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Ein Hafen f�r das Hockey unterern�hrt

Die k�ltesten Tage w�rmen gut mein Hockeyherz

As I understood the overture at this early, head-spinning, it-must-be-a-dream hour, we were being asked to take a two-week hockey vacation to go cover the Caps competing in the Worlds, with the owner footing the bill. Presumably, we’d be fully credentialed by the IIHF. There’d be Russian women. Next thought: I’ve got to call my father.

Code 12 indeed.

April 3, 7:25 a.m.: My retired father is always up early to retrieve two newspapers from his Maryland Eastern Shore grocery. But late last week he left for Colorado and some late-season skiing at Steamboat. I failed to reach him last night, and this is my second try; I’m anxious to share with him the Monday evening earthquake. After more prolonged ringing, I again receive only an unpersonalized voicemail beep. Weird.

I don’t leave a message. I need to relate this magical mayhem to him when we’re connected.

5:15 p.m.: In the press lounge of Verizon Center before the Panthers’ game, I pass along some bottled Maine microbrew to Mike Vogel culled from my March roadtrip with the Hershey Bears. “Mike!” I call out to him, trying to be discrete, then grabbing him by the arm, quieting to a whisper, “Ted really blindsided us with this Russia trip idea.”

He looks nonplused.

“I just learned about it yesterday,” he tells me.

“So let’s go to Russia,” he adds, nonchalantly.

A couple of times during the season, between periods up in press row, I rang my father simply to share with him the can-you-believe-this-atmosphere-your-blogger-son-is-immersed-in-bit-of-revelry — he watching the game in his home, me doing so amid Post and Times reporters, out-of-town press, occasionally even Jill Sorenson. I ring him again tonight, not to discuss the Florida Panthers but rather fashion to pack for Moscow in May. He’s been quite the world traveler. But no luck reaching him, again. I leave voicemail, but I’m beginning to worry a bit about a skiing mishap.

April 4: Since Monday night the four of us have discussed little but this outlandish overture. I’m noticing an inability to sleep. Oftentimes I’ll lose sleep over a writing idea, but even in those instances, after devoting 90 or so minutes to drafting on a writing pad I keep by my bed, inevitably I drift off and catch four or five hours of rest. Not this week, not yet.

The owner’s offer to us is deadly serious. A basic bit of pragmatics confronts us: the owner has asked for “one or two” of us to travel to Russia. Which one or two? We don’t need King Solomon to mediate, as two of us are married (and one three weeks into a new job) and two are bachelored and without kids. Which is to say, the bachelors can jet off at a moment’s notice with comparative ease.

Well, one of us can. (Me.) OrderedChaos is breathing in his final hours of bachelordom — an autumn wedding looms. His fiancée and he are in the throes of inside-of-six-months-to-go wedding planning. As exciting as this opportunity plainly is, accepting it presents no small hardship for the fiancée he’d leave behind. He’s thrilled by the offer, obviously, and he, like me, recognizes its once-in-a-lifetime quality, but he’s also struggling with the implications it brings to his wedding planning.

In my office I’ve attempted to reach my father by morning and afternoon since Monday evening, to no avail. I feel an ache at being isolated from him while this madness is enveloping me. I’ve told close friends and a lot of family, but the man I most need to know — my buddy and the reason I met hockey when I was seven — is elusive. I reason that high atop Steamboat, his cell phone must have no reception.

OrderedChaos has drafted and shipped off a coverage plan for the trip to Mr. Leonsis. He shared its draft with me, and I liked it a lot. By Wednesday evening, it’s settled: if this offer comes together for real, OrderedChaos and I are seizing the chance.

I receive email from Vogel. He tells me that internally it’s looking like we’re a go. For a guy who’s done his share of frequent flier mileage with the Caps, he seems genuinely fired up about this travel scheme. His email concludes, “We’re gonna kick the ass of this thing.”

April 5: First thing Thursday morning the owner sends us email informing us that it’s all a go, meaning, he’s thumbs-up to our coverage plan. A communications team of four — two from the Caps (Mike Vogel and Spike Parker) and two from OFB — will fly to Moscow right as the World Championships are heating up, and we’ll cover the tourney through its conclusion. We’d depart May 3 and return May 14.

Mr. Leonsis instructs us to prepare a workplan for the trip, and he conveys his wish to have our coverage carry a feel of being an open forum for participation by all bloggers and their readers. “Make me proud,” he concludes.

5:45 p.m.: It’s opening night for some of the first-round series in the the NHL playoffs, and via Metro I’m en route to the Capitol Hill home of my friends Mike and Marleen to watch the Pens-Senators. Once up the Potomac Avenue escalator a few blocks from their house I make another attempt to reach Dad, who on my train ride over to the Hill, it turns out, caught up with my details-free messages and began his own frantic return outreach while I was underground in Metro.

When I hear his voice I feel like a boy on Christmas morning. He’d changed cell phones right before his ski trip, I learned, and wasn’t caught up with its new technology as it related to voicemail. You don’t need to be 65 to have that trouble, I tell him. He feels horrible, but I’m relieved that he’s fine, and I’m elated to hear his voice.

“So Dad,” I tell him, “What would you say if I told you that the owner of the Caps wanted to fly me to Russia in a couple of weeks to cover the World Championships . . . to get up every day and watch world-class hockey and write about it?”

“Is this a joke?” he asks in astonishment.

“John! John!!!”

All the week’s distress at being unconnected with him is washed away in 5 minutes of very happy hour phone chat. An hour later Elaine, his wife, rings my cell to inform me that my father with the seriously bum knee “raced” down their home’s stairs, faster than an Olympic downhiller, shouting her name the whole way, to convey the news to her.

April 6: We meet Vogel and Spike Parker for lunch at a Thai joint a sand wedge away from Verizon Center. My boss is still away on an Easter week vacation, but I’m blunt with my office manager about what’s happening: a novel idea is getting serious, and this afternoon I need a good two hours for a power lunch to pursue it. Cyndi, my office manager, is mother-pride ebullient about it all. “Take as long as you need,” she tells me.

Today marks the Caps’ final practice of the season, and Vogel and Parker have end-of-season tasks and footage to capture at Kettler. So they run late getting over to the Thai joint, and while Ordered and I are fidgeting in our booth, speculating whimsically about the delay (”They’ve gone with another blog!”), I’m also delighting in the prolonged dream-sphere quality to this scheme. I don’t care how long it takes the Caps’ guys to get here; until they do, I can maintain all volume and rainbow-breadth of imagined intrigue about this opportunity that I’ve built up the past week through almost entirely sleepless nights, all of it unspoiled by the specifics of its actual workload.

I look around at the crowded restaurant and imagine the mundaneness of the business discussions (even if one or two are of the Fortune 500 merger variety) taking place relative to that that OFB is set to engage in. I’m savoring the novelty of it all. Ordered is savoring the novelty as well, chased with a beer.

He and I keep checking the time on our cell phones, awaiting our lunch partners. I tell my bloggermate that I hope the lunch runs real long and carries me to the cusp of the end of the workweek, so that I can get home and try and crash hard without obligations this weekend. Never in my life have I endured so sleepless a week, and with such an unfathomable inspiration for it.

The Caps’ communications guys arrive, all apologies for getting tied up at the final practice. While there is some obvious novelty to this scheme, both Vogel and Parker go about discussing tournament coverage calm and professionally — this is after all their profession. Vogel points out that he went to the World Juniors during the lockout because the Caps had drafted Alexander Ovechkin the previous summer, and while he hadn’t signed yet with the Caps, there was obvious buzz about him in hockey D.C. “A similar kind of buzz has emerged with Nicklas Backstrom [the Caps' no. 1 pick last June], and so we want to make him a focal point of our Moscow coverage,” he says.

Vogel is a bit concerned with media credentials for all four of us, and the formal IIHF deadline for applying for them passed on March 27. But he’s not too concerned.

Parker, a military brat, is far and away the most traveled member of our team. He’s lived seemingly everywhere, and he appears to know Europe pretty well. He informs us that the Caps’ Russian scouts will be at our disposal, guiding us through the maize of Moscow culture. We’ll need visas to enter Russia.

Lunch runs long, but not too long, and as I walk out of Chinatown back toward my K St. office in brilliant sunshine I’m anticipating about 90 minutes of busy work before being liberated for a weekend’s worth of catchup sleep. I have zero plans for my weekend other than trying to sort out the twenty seven hundred dazzling, mystifying, and sleep-draining thoughts in my head placed there at week’s start by Ted Leonsis. I think I’ll enjoy this weekend.

(continue with Part II)