Coach.”
Blackburn shook his head. “No. Not all the games.” He stopped and looked around again, catching each of us by the eyes. I felt as if he was about to tell us a secret. “The ultimate goal, boys, is to win one game. One game.” He held up a finger. “That one game, boys, is the Michigan state championship final. Of course we’re going to have to win a few others on the way. And we’re going to have to lose some, too. But that’s all right. Did you hear me? That’s all right. Because losing’s good for winning, boys. Hear me? Losing is good for winning. We’re going to lose some, and then we’re going to win. And we’re going to win that one game. The state championship.” He waited for it to sink in. “Understand?”
“Yes, Coach,” we answered in unison.
He grabbed the whistle dangling at his neck and blew a short blast. “OK,” he said. “Let’s skate.”
A year later, our parents called a meeting. They weren’t happy with Coach Blackburn. He wasn’t the friendly, easygoing guy they’d laughed and drank with at Make-Believe Gardens. He’d had the gall to ban the parents from watching practices. He told them he didn’t want their kids looking to their mommies and daddies for help when Coach was making us skate endless circles and sprints and stops-and-starts without ever once putting a stick to a puck. He’d go around before those no-puck practices and put short stacks of pucks at each face-off dot. We weren’t allowed to touch them. “Dying for those biscuits, eh?” he would say. “Makes you hungry.” Word got back to the parents that a few of us had lost our breakfasts out there.
Worse for our moms and dads, we weren’t winning. We had finished that first season under Coach 23–27 and didn’t make the state playoffs. The parents blamed Coach, of course. For skating us without pucks. For making us play a defensive scheme he called the “Rat Trap” that slowed the game and kept us from scoring many goals. For inviting top-notch teams from Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and, scariest of all, Detroit, to come up and play us on weekends. In the past, the Rats had avoided the Detroit teams until the state playoffs, but Coach said that only by playing those great teams repeatedly could we learn and then exploit their weaknesses. Of course, every time they beat us by six or seven goals, he reassured us that losing was good for winning.
But what really had the parents in a lather was that Coach had begun to recruit players from outside Starvation. On a low rise behind his cabin he’d built three small plankboard houses where those out-of-town players could board from September to May. He called the buildings and the players “billets.” Billets were common in Canada, brand-new to northern Michigan. The day before the parents called their meeting, Blackburn had cut a local player, Jeff Champagne, in favor of a billet from Racine, Wisconsin, named Teddy Boynton.
The parents assembled around the picnic tables in the snack bar at our town rink. My mother sat at a table in the back. The smells of mustard and popcorn wafted on the air. Don Champagne, Jeff’s father, spoke first. “This is our town and our rink that we built with our own hard-earned dollars, and we don’t need a bunch of out-of-town folks who didn’t put a dime into our rink,” he said. “The River Rats ought to be players from Starvation Lake, and Starvation Lake only.”
Soupy and I and the rest of the River Rats waited outside, as Coach had instructed, but we peeked and eavesdropped through the cracks in the door, as Coach no doubt had expected. He sat alone at a table facing the parents and listened, wordless, as one parent after another stood to complain about the billets, the no-puck practices, the Rat Trap. Just about everyone had something to say, except my own mother, which wasn’t at all like her.
When every argument had been repeated two or three times, Coach smiled and placed his hands
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