The Game Read Online Free Page B

aches than I ever had, no special diet to follow, no regimen of extra sleep. My body seems to move the way it always has, the game moves no faster for me than it did. But suddenly age is the dominant fact of my life. After years of ignoring time, I have become sensitive to it. I look around the dressing room at younger players who look like me and older ones who have aged. I slap my stomach and say, “Ahh, I feel great,” and I never did that before. My weight remains what it always was, but it looks different. I look different. I was always the youngest in everything I did—in school, on hockey teams and baseball teams. Then on July 29, 1976, a reporter from The Gazette called me a “veteran goalie.” I didn’t feel like a veteran then, but I feel like one now.
    I have a past I didn’t have before, and now I wonder what comes next? I have discovered that I enjoy being good at something. I like the way it makes me feel, and the way it makes others treat me. It isn’t the praise, or the generous perks of celebrity; it is the implicit, unstated respect it gives. It is a shared understanding that requires no fast talk, no big cars or flashy clothes, that needs not be argued or explained. It is simply there— they know . What will I be good at now?
    Without the precious safety net I have carried under me all my life—(s)cholar- athlete , articulate athlete —without the athlete, what will I be?
    Where will I find the feelings I have come to need—the sense of common purpose, the spirit of doing something I believe in, the feeling of doing something right? What is good enough for me now? Like Eliza Doolittle, filled with new and omnivorous expectations, I wonder, “What is to become of me?”
    Until now, life for me has been one long continuum, and hockey has been its link. From age six to age thirty-one, I have shared the same passion and preoccupation; I have had the same pattern to my years. But that will now change. If it is true that a sports career pro-longs adolescence, it is also true that when that career ends, it deposits a player into premature middle age. For, while he was always older than he seemed, he is suddenly younger than he feels. He feels old.
    His illusions about himself, fuelled by a public life, sent soaring then crashing, have disappeared just as those of contemporaries have come to full bloom. He is left bitter, or jealous; or perhaps he just knows too much. It is a life that is lived in one-quarter time. “Boy wonder,” “(e)merging star,” “middle-age problem,” “aging veteran,” all in ten short years, and now in his thirties and still a young man, he feels too old to start again.
    As I think about next year, I feel myself slowly turning inward and away from the game. I feel that absorbing commitment I always felt only occasionally now. My highs are not so high, my lows no longer so depressingly low. It comes with age and a broadened perspective, but it is an emotional fudge. I don’t want to feel the same precarious swings any more. I want to feel comfortable and secure; I want to control what I do, and how I feel. I have become detached and incessantly analytical.
    From the referendum on Quebec’s independence to the “Son of Sam” (m)urders, I find almost everything “interesting,” and if pressed for more, I offer explanations . I show that I “understand” how such things happen, and I go no further. But as I hold back, giving less of myself, I find that I’m losing my enthusiasm for the game. In an athlete, it is not the legs that go first, it is the enthusiasm that drives the legs. I go to optional practices, I work as hard as I ever did, but my motivation is different: where once I felt joy, now I feel joy mixed with grim desperation. I will not get any better. I must fight to keep what I have.
    I have one goal left in hockey. Other people, sensing I might retire, have urged me to stay another year or more, to turn three (after this season perhaps four)