(no subject)
So, tell us about your name. Do you have a middle name? Do you have several? Do you go by a pseudonym? A nickname? Why? What about your username? Give us a story. There’s got to be some reason you’re called what you are called.
His first day of practice as a Boston Bruin, Eddie Shore-twenty-four, desperate (one imagines) to slough whatever trace remained of the Saskatchewan farm boy who’d taken up hockey because his brother said he’d never be any good at it-skated out onto the ice and into the path of teammate Billy Coutu. For whatever reason (and in those days, “this is hockey” was often reason enough) Coutu had it in for the team’s newest addition. He was relentless-barreling down the rink, throwing himself into Shore with enough force to set the other man’s bones ringing. It wasn’t long before Shore began to give as good as he got, matching Coutu blow for blow, bruise for bruise. The game fell away; again and again they found each other, instinctively, like lovers locking eyes from across a crowded room, bodies meeting with a sickening crunch.
And then Coutu charged one final time. Stop for a moment and think of it: the tshhh of his blades on that scarred practice ice, the cold air whipping through his hair (nobody wore helmets then; nobody would wear a helmet for thirty-five years), the implacable grace with which he ran down his teammate.
Shore saw him coming. He let him come.
The two men collided and Coutu hit the ice, transported almost instantly to the woozy limbo between consciousness and unconsciousness. As for Shore, his left ear had been ripped down the middle, top to bottom. Blood spilled from the gash, streaming down the side of his face, dribbling off the tip of his chin, but he remained on his feet.
When the team’s doctors informed him that the ear would need to be amputated, Shore decided he wanted a more optimistic physician tending his wounds. He went from doctor to doctor-presumably he’d changed clothes and slapped a bandage on the ear before taking to the streets, but in my mind’s eye he wears his sweat-soaked practice jersey and the ear is slick with blood-until he found one who agreed to stitch the ear back together. The operation was a success; it should surprise nobody who’s paid the least bit of attention to the preceding remarks to learn that Shore endured it without the benefit of anesthetic.
In grade school we used to play this game called typewriter. What you’d do was you’d pick out a likely-looking victim, somebody small and not overburdened with friends, and shove him-like most schoolyard games, this one had vaguely homoerotic undercurrents, and besides, the girls cried too easily-to the ground. You’d plant your knees in the hollows of his arms and commence jabbing at his chest with your index fingers, as if he were the Smith Corona on which you clacked out thank yous to your Auntie Edna.
I don’t know what it was that made me the favorite. No, that isn’t true-it was the way I squirmed and thrashed and squealed and erupted sometimes in laughter and sometimes in tears. Even the real dunces of the school, kids possessed of an almost supernatural stupidity-Nick Lustig, for instance, who postulated that the photographs in our history textbook were black and white because color hadn’t seeped into the world until the ‘40s-had the sense to bear their pummelings stoically, to feign boredom, nonchalance, or at the very least death. I, on the other hand, lacked the survival instincts of a possum. Beating me up must have been an immensely satisfying experience.
I tripped over Eddie Shore’s name-my name-in the index of The Encyclopedia of Hockey or some similarly titled tome. He was the subject of a lengthy article written, like most sports reportage of the day, with a curious blend of bloodlust, reverence and folksiness-the kind of writing that prompts the reader to, when he’s finished, prod his teeth with his tongue to ensure they’re all present. I sank to the floor and, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the aisle, drank it all in.
In the course of his career as a professional hockey player, Shore received 978 stitches. His nose was broken 14 times; his jaw was broken 5 times. His hip was fractured, his back was fractured, his collarbone was broken. Both his eyeballs were split open.
I had bruises on my chest. Tiny ones-no bigger than a dime. I’d count them in the shower, monitor their shifts in color: indigo to olive to mustard.
And we had the same name.
I wanted to be him, of course-to be the one still standing, the rookie triumphant, awash in my own blood and somehow okay with that. I wanted (having performed the necessary bit of mental arithmetic) to be his long-lost great grandson. I wanted, for just five minutes, to know what it was to be invulnerable.
I kept him to myself, Eddie Shore, although the coincidence of our shared surname begged for embellishment, ought to have formed the centerpiece at a lavish dinner party, to be cooed over as guests passed platter after platter of lovingly prepared lies around the table, spooning the choicest ones onto their plates.
Instead it was more of a talisman, a lucky coin. Something I could slip into my pocket and finger for reassurance.
The strangest things sustain you in your youth. Much as I loved my father (and I did-ineptly, perhaps, but deeply and without reservation), the thought of him beating the stuffing out of my tormentors or, more improbable still, careering down the ice to crash through a line of defensemen…if Eddie Shore prevailed by dint of his own strength and a bone-deep toughness, Nathaniel Shore did so thanks to an unerring instinct for the weaknesses of others.
Make no mistake, Eddie Shore was a brute. He approached the game of hockey-a game I enjoy today for its breathtaking swiftness, for the grace and skill of its players-the way a battering ram does a bolted gate. He brought us both the first NHL All-Star game and the first players’ union-the former by checking Ace Bailey of the Toronto Maple Leafs with such viciousness that the man fell to the ice and fractured his skull, spent two weeks so close to death that he was administered last rites by a priest, and underwent two emergency brain surgeries before recovering (the game was held as a benefit for Bailey-whose hockey career had of course come to an end the moment his head hit the ice-and his family) and the latter by managing the Springfield Indians in such a miserly fashion (withholding pay without cause, forcing his players to perform menial tasks ranging from changing light bulbs to popping popcorn to sweeping the arena after games to inflating balloons) that eventually the team flat-out refused to play.
But. But there I was, a boy whose only history was the dirt under his nails, the scratches on his legs, and whose future…
All of a sudden, my name was a promise.
His first day of practice as a Boston Bruin, Eddie Shore-twenty-four, desperate (one imagines) to slough whatever trace remained of the Saskatchewan farm boy who’d taken up hockey because his brother said he’d never be any good at it-skated out onto the ice and into the path of teammate Billy Coutu. For whatever reason (and in those days, “this is hockey” was often reason enough) Coutu had it in for the team’s newest addition. He was relentless-barreling down the rink, throwing himself into Shore with enough force to set the other man’s bones ringing. It wasn’t long before Shore began to give as good as he got, matching Coutu blow for blow, bruise for bruise. The game fell away; again and again they found each other, instinctively, like lovers locking eyes from across a crowded room, bodies meeting with a sickening crunch.
And then Coutu charged one final time. Stop for a moment and think of it: the tshhh of his blades on that scarred practice ice, the cold air whipping through his hair (nobody wore helmets then; nobody would wear a helmet for thirty-five years), the implacable grace with which he ran down his teammate.
Shore saw him coming. He let him come.
The two men collided and Coutu hit the ice, transported almost instantly to the woozy limbo between consciousness and unconsciousness. As for Shore, his left ear had been ripped down the middle, top to bottom. Blood spilled from the gash, streaming down the side of his face, dribbling off the tip of his chin, but he remained on his feet.
When the team’s doctors informed him that the ear would need to be amputated, Shore decided he wanted a more optimistic physician tending his wounds. He went from doctor to doctor-presumably he’d changed clothes and slapped a bandage on the ear before taking to the streets, but in my mind’s eye he wears his sweat-soaked practice jersey and the ear is slick with blood-until he found one who agreed to stitch the ear back together. The operation was a success; it should surprise nobody who’s paid the least bit of attention to the preceding remarks to learn that Shore endured it without the benefit of anesthetic.
In grade school we used to play this game called typewriter. What you’d do was you’d pick out a likely-looking victim, somebody small and not overburdened with friends, and shove him-like most schoolyard games, this one had vaguely homoerotic undercurrents, and besides, the girls cried too easily-to the ground. You’d plant your knees in the hollows of his arms and commence jabbing at his chest with your index fingers, as if he were the Smith Corona on which you clacked out thank yous to your Auntie Edna.
I don’t know what it was that made me the favorite. No, that isn’t true-it was the way I squirmed and thrashed and squealed and erupted sometimes in laughter and sometimes in tears. Even the real dunces of the school, kids possessed of an almost supernatural stupidity-Nick Lustig, for instance, who postulated that the photographs in our history textbook were black and white because color hadn’t seeped into the world until the ‘40s-had the sense to bear their pummelings stoically, to feign boredom, nonchalance, or at the very least death. I, on the other hand, lacked the survival instincts of a possum. Beating me up must have been an immensely satisfying experience.
I tripped over Eddie Shore’s name-my name-in the index of The Encyclopedia of Hockey or some similarly titled tome. He was the subject of a lengthy article written, like most sports reportage of the day, with a curious blend of bloodlust, reverence and folksiness-the kind of writing that prompts the reader to, when he’s finished, prod his teeth with his tongue to ensure they’re all present. I sank to the floor and, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the aisle, drank it all in.
In the course of his career as a professional hockey player, Shore received 978 stitches. His nose was broken 14 times; his jaw was broken 5 times. His hip was fractured, his back was fractured, his collarbone was broken. Both his eyeballs were split open.
I had bruises on my chest. Tiny ones-no bigger than a dime. I’d count them in the shower, monitor their shifts in color: indigo to olive to mustard.
And we had the same name.
I wanted to be him, of course-to be the one still standing, the rookie triumphant, awash in my own blood and somehow okay with that. I wanted (having performed the necessary bit of mental arithmetic) to be his long-lost great grandson. I wanted, for just five minutes, to know what it was to be invulnerable.
I kept him to myself, Eddie Shore, although the coincidence of our shared surname begged for embellishment, ought to have formed the centerpiece at a lavish dinner party, to be cooed over as guests passed platter after platter of lovingly prepared lies around the table, spooning the choicest ones onto their plates.
Instead it was more of a talisman, a lucky coin. Something I could slip into my pocket and finger for reassurance.
The strangest things sustain you in your youth. Much as I loved my father (and I did-ineptly, perhaps, but deeply and without reservation), the thought of him beating the stuffing out of my tormentors or, more improbable still, careering down the ice to crash through a line of defensemen…if Eddie Shore prevailed by dint of his own strength and a bone-deep toughness, Nathaniel Shore did so thanks to an unerring instinct for the weaknesses of others.
Make no mistake, Eddie Shore was a brute. He approached the game of hockey-a game I enjoy today for its breathtaking swiftness, for the grace and skill of its players-the way a battering ram does a bolted gate. He brought us both the first NHL All-Star game and the first players’ union-the former by checking Ace Bailey of the Toronto Maple Leafs with such viciousness that the man fell to the ice and fractured his skull, spent two weeks so close to death that he was administered last rites by a priest, and underwent two emergency brain surgeries before recovering (the game was held as a benefit for Bailey-whose hockey career had of course come to an end the moment his head hit the ice-and his family) and the latter by managing the Springfield Indians in such a miserly fashion (withholding pay without cause, forcing his players to perform menial tasks ranging from changing light bulbs to popping popcorn to sweeping the arena after games to inflating balloons) that eventually the team flat-out refused to play.
But. But there I was, a boy whose only history was the dirt under his nails, the scratches on his legs, and whose future…
All of a sudden, my name was a promise.