More and more it takes a moment just to sort things out, sometimes even to find myself. It’s dark and deep in there. You want to mark your way back, like Hansel and Gretel. You live in the moment as an athlete and a referee, but now it’s mainly in my memories I spend my time. Surprising how easy to keep a kind of order there, piece of cake for someone who’s been an official in four sports. Not to say I ever understood it all. Him for example. Who could ever get a handle on him? But I like how they never change, the important memories, never new details to get in the way. I travel between them easily now. I remind myself more and more of Helen, my first wife. Catholic and French Canadian, she’d drag me into old cathedrals. We’d sit in the quiet a while, then wander past the Stations of the Cross. I used to ask her which was her favourite. I liked number nine myself, those sad and waiting women by the road, a little sanity and dignity and caring in all the craziness. She’d only look at me and smile— at what, I never really knew. Sometimes, what brings you back is something happening here in the present. Bunny, in the entranceway, scraping paper off the wall. A new voice at the door. I listen to hear how she likes him.
“Oh I knew him.” Storey looks up from wherever he’s been and begins to speak again. “The number of games I worked and the kind of guy I was, I knew them all. But there was something about him, something more than just how good he was. You noticed people were always looking to see where he was or what he was doing. When I think about him, I see him head down, lazily sweeping snow from his crease. Or, late in the game, he’d be down on one knee, his eyes on the ice. His mind on God knows what.” He settles back in his carved wooden chair, unfurling and furling the edge of a woollen blanket that covers his legs. “That’s what you want to know about, I suppose.”
Even the sound of his name says hockey to me. When he was on his game, there wasn’t anyone better. And he seemed to save his best for Montreal, and me working out of here then, I saw him a lot. He nearly drove Dick Irvin out of his mind, pacing back and forth behind the Canadiens’ bench, leaning close to one guy’s ear then leaning close to another. After the game I’d say, Dick you gotta take it easy, one of these nights you’ll have a stroke out here. “I can’t help it,” he says. “How the dickens do you beat the guy? He knows what you’re going to do before you do it. I never see it but I know he’s always watching me. I lie awake at night. I think my wife is going to leave me.”
Storey listens a moment to the noises in the hall. An old front door with stained glass panels rattling closed. A plastic bucket’s hollow clunk. The scraping at the walls again. “Well, that’s a bit of a joke, me saying that to him and it happens to me. Hey, you know what they say, how big dogs don’t live as long. Look at me—83 and rising out of my ashes again. We live a long time in my family and I always lived the way I played my games, hard but clean. And I’ve been blessed with wonderful people around me, starting with my mother. Now I got a new hero— she’s the one who let you in. Taught me how to live all over again. Fed me with a spoon. Showed me what the pan was for.” He glances at the door then pushes the blanket away from his legs. Here in his den, the walls are cluttered with photographs and yellowed pages from the papers, the shelves and mantel behind him with trophies. “That one’s him in Detroit in ’52. What he did in the playoffs that year will never be done again.” He jabs his thumb over his other shoulder. “That’s him again, jawing away at some fan. That was Terry too. But I’ll tell you this about him, mister—he was a big game goalie. He was the one you wanted when the heat was on. I’ve seen him use the handle of his stick to stop the puck.”
He made me think of my football days. Big as he was and alert and crouched like a cat, he looked more like your middle linebacker watching everywhere, bracing himself to knock somebody down. Balance and angles, that’s what he understood. Terry was a great angle goalie, one of the first. That’s what beat him up—21 years of taking shots to the body and terrible gear. But it was football damaged his arm, locked it like this, see, good for holding the stick, but he could never lift it over his head. He broke it getting tackled as a kid and wouldn’t say a word for days, too frightened to tell his mother. No football, she’d said. Sounds familiar, not much point going up against what mine wanted either. Once he told me she was the only one in the world who scared him. He loved the game though. He liked to watch the Lions play in Detroit. Got into some heavy drinking with some of their guys, I heard. Maybe football was where the crouch comes from. Wherever, it changed the game.
“Him and Hall and Plante. I’d of taken any one of them. Too bad you can’t go talk to Plante. That guy was one of a kind. Before he played goal for Montreal, he was a catcher here in the old Quebec League— Johnny Wilson used to pitch to him. And here’s Toe Blake telling him you wear a mask, you’ll never find the puck at your feet. Toe didn’t miss much but he missed that one. Plante and Sawchuk and Hall. After those guys, playing goal was never the same. And Bower and Worsley. There’s others, Durnan, Rayner, Lumley … Doesn’t bear thinking about, what it took to stand in there night after night, no mask, no backup, nobody else on the team with a half a clue what goalies were up against. The coaches weren’t much better. Toe was one of the greatest, but the wars that him and Plante had over the mask.” He shakes his head. “Well, you know who won that one in the end. Go talk to Kenny Reardon, he was there. And Eddie Shore, for goodness sakes, a great coach, but he could be a madman dealing with goalies. He hated it when they went down, even to make a save. He wanted his goalies to stay on their feet. Once he drops a noose around his goalie’s neck in practice and slings the rope up over a beam. Every time the poor bugger starts to go down, Eddie jerks the rope. Me, I tried to protect them. I’d seen too many hurt and hurt bad, and I had a sense of what they were up against. The game was changing too in Sawchuk’s day, everyone trying to figure out how to beat those guys. Geoffrion wailing away with his slap shot. Hull and the boys in Chicago heating the blades of their sticks and bending them under the dressing room door. Slapshots. Screen shots. Deflections. Pucks flying everywhere. You knew how hard when you heard them whack the glass. The traffic in front got heavier too, goalies getting run over, hooked and hauled down. I’d be in as quick as I could, peeling guys off them.”
The scraping out in the hall moves closer now. Storey looks down at his hands again and around the walls. There’s not much wallpaper showing in here, with all his clippings and photographs and shelves of trophies. “All my adult life,” he says, “I’ve lived in this house. And I’d leave for the Forum closing that glass door so carefully …” He’s quiet a moment, getting his thoughts back together. “I saw more than a few who buckled under the pressure of playing goal. Here in Montreal, Durnan, McNeil, Wilf Cude a bit further back, even Worsley, once he comes to know what it’s like to play for a team that’s expected to win. Even Plante. Some wise guy reporter makes a joke about it, calling it rubberitis. He’d never have to face a Bobby Hull slapshot, a puck flying at you over a hundred miles an hour. Over the years, I watched as Terry lost his way. All the anxiety, the injuries, the hard losses, the fans and papers blaming him, calling him washed up and sullen and surly. It takes its toll. Four hundred stitches in his face alone. He had trouble sleeping too because of what the years in that deep crouch did to his back. And that weird thing with his weight. They make him lose weight, then he can’t get it back when he needs it. They pay more attention to that sort of thing nowadays. I blame Adams for all that. Terry had a big family too. Then his heavy drinking at the end.”
Harvey and Sawchuk. You think of them together. Sad, the two of them get tagged with being booze hounds. Big men, both of them, and proud, and the best at what they did. They both had long careers, too long, and got slower and bitter over being bought and sold and treated badly by the fans and the press. Guys as good as they were, people always ask too much. There’s some nasty sons of bitches up in the crowd. Any referee can tell you that.
“Harvey and Sawchuk,” he says. “That funny connection too, the big trade of one for the other that never gets made when Adams gets cold feet. When it came down to it, even having Harvey, Adams doesn’t want any part of facing Terry with all that firepower in front of him. So he buries him in Boston with the lowly Bruins. Goodbye Terry, Goodbye. He was never the same after that. Not as a player and not as a person. Guys in those days, they felt a loyalty to their teams. Terry trusted Jack Adams like a father. Dumping him off like that, Adams destroyed his confidence. It made him bitter. Even when Jack goes sour on Hall and brings Terry home to Detroit, he’s never the same. All the shots and hits he took in all those years, they did a job on him. But getting traded away from what they had there in Detroit, that really did him in.”
He sits back in his chair, the big head nodding slowly, remembering. “Tough town, Boston. They never forgave him for leaving the team like he did. Man, they spared no one. There was one guy really used to give it to me. ‘Hey Storey,’ he’d bellow, ‘we got a town down here named after you.’ And he always picked his spot. Always that same foghorn voice, that same line, but I never knew when it was coming. It wasn’t linked to anything I did or said or how the game was going. But everyone in the Gardens was waiting. I’d be waiting too and sometimes it would get really late in the game and I hadn’t heard anything and I’d think, thank Christ, maybe just this once, he’s not here. Maybe he’s dead. But sure as hell that’s when you’d hear it, ‘Hey Storey, we got a town in Massachusetts named after you.’ Everyone would go quiet and then he’d bellow, ‘Marblehead!’ And the whole darn place would crack up. Even the players would look at me and grin. Same line every time but the guy just had the voice and really knew how to get under your skin. ‘We got a town down here named after you.’ Man, those days are gone.”
He’s quiet again a moment. A grey light comes in through a window. Montreal in winter. Grey light, grey days. But a briskness in the downtown streets, an intensity, especially when the Canadiens were home for a couple of games. “St Catherine’s and Atwater,” he looks up suddenly. An energy returns to his voice even as his face grows indistinct in the fading light. “It was always busy down there. But when you saw those words up over the Forum’s doors, Hockey Tonight—man, they just picked up your step, even after I was out of the League. They told you life was good. They told you the woman with you was just the right one, and whichever restaurant or bar you were heading for was just the perfect place to go before the game.” Storey looks back at his hands a moment, looking from one to the other, as if he were weighing something. “Well, I’m a positive guy and something tells me you might understand all that. I don’t know. Sometimes I think the trade was what did him in and sometimes I think it was something else altogether. I remember a kind of darkness in him from the start. He had a wonderful side—he could be kind and dry and humourous. Then you’d get the silences. And sudden explosions.
“Jesus that crazy question he asks me that time.”
“Did I ever get him figured out? Ask me something easier.”