PUCK DROP

IN THE FALL OF 1986 the Minnesota North Stars invited me to drop the first puck and open their hockey season, a ceremony I had never heard of, so I bought a puck after lunch one day and practiced dropping it on my office floor. It takes approximately one second for a dropped puck to hit the deck and it drops straight down, so there’s not much a dropper can do to make the drop graceful—or much that can go wrong either, if you look at it that way. So I called the North Stars back and said yes and thought no more of it until I got to the arena a couple weeks later. Baseball’s ceremonial Opening Day toss is a mass of complications compared with the puck drop, and over the years there must’ve been dozens of tossers—governors, mayors, owners, old-timers—who turned in their sleep, reliving the moment when, in jam-packed Weems Stadium on a fine April afternoon, all eyes turned on His Grace as he accepted the ceremonial ball, rubbed it up in a clownish way, trying to project to the vast throng an air of nonchalance, even slight self-mockery, and, grinning at other dignitaries and the photographers, made a ridiculous stiff windup and pitched the ball feebly into the dirt—a dinky throw that made forty thousand people simultaneously think, “Wimp”—and then tried to appear amused at his disgrace and waved to the masses and sat down on a cup of beer. A ceremonial toss could end up tossing a wrench into a man’s life and years later be thrown back at him by strangers at parties, no matter how distinguished his later career (“Saw you at the ballpark. About ten years ago, wasn’t it? That time you tossed the ball out. Heh-heh”), but a puck drop is simpler, or so I thought until I got to the arena and remembered: Ice. You have to walk on ice. Falling was on my mind as I walked across the dark parking lot and down into the bright fluorescent bowels of the arena, where a friendly young guy from the front office led me down concrete halls past crates of souvenirs through mists of sausage steam from the kitchens, past a waiting ambulance, to the passageway outside the North Stars’ dressing room that led to the ice, where, at the moment, the Boston Bruins were zooming around and where in a few minutes, said my guide, after the introduction of the players and brief remarks by the team owners, George and Gordon Gund, and prior to the National Anthem, I would proceed to the face-off circle at center ice, where the puck would be dropped. “By the way, there’s a microphone, if you want to say a few words, but-you don’t have to,” he said.

To the danger of ice now was added the greater danger of speech, a slippery step for a ceremonial person: consider how many men, invited ex officio to snip a ribbon or toss a shovelful of dirt, have stepped to a microphone and given more of themselves than the occasion called for—I remember a Methodist minister who stood to give the invocation at my son’s soccer-awards banquet and couldn’t resist the chance to tell a joke about a man found hiding in the closet when the woman’s husband came home early from work. We laughed (nervously) at the punch line (“Everybody’s got to be somewhere”) and then he tried to top that joke for about ten minutes before he finally turned to God in prayer. I wondered if the microphone would be right in my path across the ice so I’d have to step around it and my silence would look sneaky or arrogant (“Big Shot Snubs Crowd, Has No Comment as Thousands Sit in Stunned Disappointment—‘We drove all day and all night to see him,’ said unemployed father of eleven, comforting his weeping wife, eight months pregnant, ‘and he didn’t say a word, this is the low point of our lives, I don’t see how we can go on’ ”) and I tried to think of ten or fifteen terrific words I could say about Winter Our Favorite Season, or Hockey in a Democratic Society, but that seemed to lead toward a major speech (Crowd Attacks Man Who Delays Hockey Game in Mid-Ice Filibuster—“ Someone lower down in the organization invited him to drop the puck,” said tight-lipped North Stars execs, “and we expect to know their identity within the next thirty-six hours”).

I asked John Mariucci, a Stars exec and an old friend, why I was chosen, and he thought for a long time. Mr. Mariucci is almost seventy, a former defenseman, a man sometimes called the Father of Minnesota Hockey but more often called John, and he put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed it. “We’ve had our eye on you,” he said in his sweet high voice. “We’ve seen you drop quite a few things over the years and we like your style. You have a good release.”

And then suddenly it was my cue. The young guy put a puck in my hand, a muffled voice boomed my name in the darkened arena, there was light applause like water going over a small dam, the spotlight swung toward me, and I smiled affably and stepped down the runway through the door in the boards onto the ice. A tall woman in a brief spangly suit skated over and took my left arm—on skates, she towered over me—“just so you don’t go down,” she said, as I padded out onto the ice, “be careful, it’s slippery”—and she propelled me across the white ice. I looked down. I barely noticed the microphone in passing, or the hockey players standing at attention along the blue lines. Two players waited at center ice. They smiled two big toothless smiles, I shook their hands (both dry) and wished them each a good season, and they then faced each other, bent over, sticks ready, and I bent and then—with what some North Stars officials told me later was a graceful but economical motion—I dropped the black rubber disc on the white ice, the players feinted a swipe at it, one of them picked it up and gave it to me, the spangled lady took my elbow, and I padded back past the microphone to the runway to a second, fainter wave of applause, stood at attention as a tenor sang the Anthem, nailing the high note (“land of the free”) in a thrilling voice, and the moment was over. Nobody that evening confessed to the slightest disappointment that I had not spoken. I sat and watched the game, which the Bruins won, 5—3, and drove home and was in bed before midnight.