Page 1 of Puck You Both

Chapter 1

WALL

THE FIRST SIGN that tonight is going to go sideways is forty feet of Jumbotron deciding my hair is the main event.

I'm midway through warmups, mask up, doing the thing I do every single game in every single building in this league—left post, right post, five butterfly reps, sip of water at exactly seventeen minutes to puck drop—when the arena goes dark for the player intros and the big screen above center ice fills up with a close-up of my own head.

Specifically, my hair, which is not the dark blond it has been for twenty-eight consecutive years, but a color best described as stop sign red.

Across the top of the screen, in letters the size of Becker’s ego: BIG TOMATO ENERGY.

The crowd in Milwaukee, eighteen thousand people who already don't like me on a good day, loses its shit. Someone three rows up from the glass starts a chant. It’s “KETCHUP.” Someone else has a sign. The sign has been laminated. They planned this. I respect the preparation and hate everything else.

Somewhere in my own bench, I hear Ace's voice rise above the noise. "OH MY GOD. THEY MADE A GRAPHIC."

I do not turn around. Turning around would imply I care, which I totally don’t.

I do, however, privately revisit, for the nine-hundredth time in seventy-two hours, the chain of decisions that led to me standing in enemy territory where I’m sure some Vipers marketing intern is crafting fresh insults as we speak: the hair is not a cry for help. It's the honored settlement of a debt.

Two weeks ago, Becker bet me that Petrov's word-of-the-day app would produce a word ambitious enough, and Petrov would deploy it confidently enough, to accidentally insult Coach Martin within a calendar week. I said coach was insult-proof. I said Petrov would never. I said it out loud, in front of witnesses, with confidence of a man who’s never met Petrov.

It took four days. The word was “decrepit.” Petrov used it in a full, grammatically correct sentence. The sentence was, “Coach is wise, because he’s decrepit.” Two hours later, I was sitting in a salon chair, nineteen year old stylist asking if I was “Sure-sure.”

So. Red hair. A bet is a bet, and honoring bets is the cornerstone of civilized society. Becker says I look like an emergency flare. Becker can die.

"Wall." Speak of the defenseman. Becker skates past my crease, slow, savoring. "The jumbotron guy DMed me. He wants to know if he can use 'Big Tomato Energy' on a shirt."

"Tell him yes and demand royalties."

"Already did. We're splitting it sixty-forty."

I squint. "Whose sixty?"

Becker's already gone, cackling, which answers that.

***

THE MILWAUKEE VIPERS' net, two hundred feet away from mine, currently has a six-foot-four, too-many-consonants-in-a-row, half-Polish problem in it named Patrick Grześkowiak, and I have spent eight professional seasons trying to figure out exactly how much I hate him.

We were drafted the same year. We met for real in the juniors final—double overtime, both of us standing on our heads for way longer than should have been humanly survivable, until his team scored on a deflection so fluky it bounced off a stick, a skate, someone’s ass, a lineman’s soul, and what I have always suspected was the hand of a vengeful God, and went in over my glove with four seconds left on the clock. It was a crime against goaltending, one which I have processed completely and moved on from, which is why I can describe the trajectory from memory nine years later.

Some things you carry.

For eight pro seasons, we've traded shutouts and save-percentage leads back and forth like a couple of accountants fighting over a report nobody else is reading, and at some point a TV crew mic'd us both and captured the following exchange, which now has eleven million views on a platform I refuse to name out of spite:

"Nice pads. Did they come with the five-hole?"

"Nice hair. Did it come with an apology?"

That was two years ago. My hair was blond at the time. The clip's caption calls us "hockey's most petty feud," which is accurate in the sense that everything in it is true and somehow still manages to miss the entire point.

Tonight, midway through the second period, on a stoppage for an offside review nobody asked for, Patrick skates the length of the ice, ostensibly to talk to the ref. The ref is nowhere near my net. Patrick's route takes him directly past my crease anyway, which is roughly like walking from New York to Boston via Ohio.

He slows down just enough.

"Red's a good color on you," he says. "Matches the goal light."

I don't look at him. I'm intently watching the play that isn't happening. "You'd know," I say. "You see yours more."