On Frozen Blog

Deep into weekends I’m wearied by gym-ratting, jogging, recreating in the sun, home cleaning chores, errands, etc., and I’m all yawns come 11:00 Sunday night, when I’m waiting for the last pickup hockey player to depart my rink so I can turn out the lights and lock the door behind him. It’s a great bunch of guys in Sunday’s final skate — guys in their thirties and even fifties, the same set every Sunday, all good cheer, most of them youth hockey instructors who once a week just want a good sweat and our game’s camaraderie. They get together for a 75-minute skate each Sunday night at my rink, and until this month I’d always been cranky about shoo-ing them out so I could get home and crash.
But last Sunday night, while waiting for the their allotted 75 minutes to lapse, I read a reminiscence of the hockey locker room, of a young boy being aided into his gear by his father there, and later of that boy becoming a man and sharing that same room with rec league buddies and beers. My Sunday fatigue, I realized, is no excuse for my crankiness toward any set of hockey players seeking out a weekly retreat in the rink. The ice there and the fun had on it is but one lure; the other is the camaraderie and sanctity of the room.
There they are away from bosses, spouses, irritable neighbors, and the grown-up responsibilities of life. There men become boys again.
No other sport has it. The dugout in baseball is like a bus depot — very transitory and not much of a home. The sideline in field sports is transparent and anti-intimacy. Basketball has locker rooms, but have you ever read of them attaining anything approaching the sacred sanctuary of hockey’s? Basketballers change and shower and X and O in their room, but hockey’s room contains a culture. The amazing thing about it is that it’s every bit as sacred for the beer league squad as Les Habitants.
Guys in a hockey room are literally and figuratively naked. Divorces, affairs, firings, and mortgage crises get announced in there. I had a beer league teammate known for uttering only ribbings and off-color jokes arrive in the room all quiet one Sunday night and inform us of his wife’s cancer a few seasons back. I’m fairly certain it was the first instance he’d spoken of it outside of commiserating with family.
That’s because the hockey room is a second family room. In ‘Mystery, Alaska’ Tree rightly rebukes his teammate for betraying the code of the room: “What’s said in the room stays in the room.” On the hockey beat any reporter in any city will encounter the wall of player silence when he or she questions what the coach said after the team put up a stinker of a period or made a marvelous third-period comeback. They still ask the question — you have to, it’s the best storyline to pursue — but the answer is always the same: “Ah, you know, coach said some things.”
A special swagger, security, and exclusivity is accorded membership in the room. Individual accountability is executed there. A team lets down its guard in there. Initiations and rituals are meted out most often in the room. I can’t count the number of rec league players who’ve detailed for me the solidarity they honor and nurture with teammates they see but for 90 minutes each week. Those bonds most often aren’t forged from individual game shifts but rather from the vulnerability and support intrinsic to the hockey room.
I’ve learned on the hockey beat that there are places you just don’t step, access points you just don’t broach, in the room. When media is in the room they are accorded respect, but it is also abundantly clear that we are stranger-guests, outsiders, and that our visit is best kept brief. I like this about our sport.
Great hockey teams, it seems to me, cannot be forged without great rooms. When Capitals’ management initiated the organization’s pre-lockout rebuild it stated that its principal design was to construct a competitive club built and replenished largely from within — call it going organic. Now that the team is competitive it’s interesting to note how many of the team’s players reference the strength and caliber of the team’s room. The past two summers I’ve made a point of asking players in the Capitals’ organization what if anything they miss about hockey in summertime, and without fail every player includes in his list “being in the room with the guys.”
Surely Sergei Fedorov noticed the novelty of the Washington locker room. You have to think his experience in the Caps’ room was a condition of being mutually beneficial for his teammates and him. He sure seemed to meld with his new teammates conspicuously well. You have to think this played a part in his decision to resign in Washington this summer.
And how special that room must have been on and between the nights of those final seven regular season games in 2007-08, when the Capitals couldn’t afford to lose a single one, and when they encountered all manner of struggle and frustration in those games and yet perservered and triumphed.
Only about 25 people on planet Earth know what that room was like then. That’s as it should be.