DANIEL
Ten years ago
Hockey is in my blood.
The cold of the rink, the smell of the ice, the electricity of a crowd. I grew up three blocks from a rink in Duluth, and I spent more hours on that ice than I spent inside my own house. I still wasn’t good enough.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about loving something completely—it doesn’t guarantee you anything. Loving it doesn’t make you good at it. I loved hockey the way some people love God, and hockey looked at me and saidNope.
So I found another way in.
The Minnesota High School Hockey Tournament at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul is not the NHL. It’s not even close. But I’m here because this is one place you can find the good ones before anyone else does. The best players have been here every year since they were freshmen, most of their hockey careers starting years earlier. Some of these kids werepractically born on blades, playing as if they don’t know that what they’re doing is extraordinary.
It’s my job to know.
I’m holding a coffee that stopped being warm an hour ago and a program I haven’t looked at because I don’t need it. I’ve been watching the kid in the number 19 jersey for forty minutes, and I already know.
He’s something.
Not just good. Exceptional.
Most people can’t see it, but I can—the difference between a player who executes and a player who thinks. Number 19 plays the way a great chess player does, like he sees three moves ahead and adjusts in real time, marrying instinct with intelligence. I haven’t seen a kid with this level of skill in my five years of doing this.
“That kid is something else, isn’t he?” a man says next to me.
He points at number 19.
I glance at the man. He stands out because he’s wearing a suit that costs more than my rent.
“He sure is,” I say carefully.
You don’t show your cards at these things.
“You a scout?” he asks.
“Agent,” I say. “Independent. You?”
He turns to look at me then. He has the kind of face that’s hard to age—he could be in his late forties or nearing sixty.
“Business,” he says simply. Like that covers everything.
He extends a hand. “Bruce Granger.”
I shake it. “Daniel Crewe.”
“You been watching him all game?”
“Most of it.”
“And?”
I look back at the ice. “He’s the best player on this ice by far,” I say. “Best I’ve seen at this level in years.”
“You know his family?” Bruce asks.
“Not yet,” I say. “You?”
“I know of them,” he says. “Whitman family.”
