“Alex was a lot like I was when I was a kid,” Norm began as we waited for our food. “He was a straight arrow. Sort of a protector. He was a class clown, just like me. Very into routine. Very particular about the location of his toothbrush and towel. Just like how pathetic I am—routine keeps me sane. Sports were his guiding light.”
Norm’s first son, Max, was born five years after Norm’s arrival in Denver, when he and Laura still lived in a small house in Aurora that faced an unfinished commercial park and Buckley Air Force Base’s looming polyhedral radomes, known around Denver as the “golf balls.” When Laura became pregnant again in 1986, Norm knew they needed something bigger and better, with a broad, flat yard out back where his boys could learn half of what they needed to know about life and a nearby ice rink where they could learn the rest. Though he had just undergone knee surgery to repair a torn ACL from hockey, Norm brokered the biggest deal of his life to scrape together the down payment for the ranch-style fixer-upper that would one day unsettle me with its perfection and began hobbling over every weekend to paint, plaster, and shingle. A month before the deal closed, Laura went into labor with their second son.
Alex was born on April 11, 1987. By the time he was four years old, Norm had strapped skates to his feet and swung him out over the ice at the South Suburban Family Sports Ice Arena, a mile from their new house. By the time he was seven, he was charging around under his own power with a stick jammed in his gloves and a helmet the size of his torso for the Littleton Hockey Association’s youngest competitive team, the under-eight “Mites,” coached by Norm and a family friend named Murray Platt. He loved skating, loved scoring, loved bonking into teammates so both flopped to the ice, though he was smaller than most since his birthday was right after the cutoff.
Norm and his siblings were the product of an unlikely pairing. Al Senior, their father, was the son of Jewish glove makers in New York. Beverly Beck, their mother, was a glamorous Texan belle who met Al on a fashion-buying trip. Norm’s best memories of his own childhood were from the Beck family ranch an hour south of San Angelo, where Beverly’s brother Bernie raised cantankerous emus and skittish African deer. Starting when Alex was in kindergarten, Norm arranged to take his own boys there each summer to dodge scorpions and cottonmouth snakes and shoot crickets with a BB gun for use as bait to catch bass in the Concho River.
By fourth grade Alex had grown into a rambunctious, sweet-natured boy with blue eyes and straw-colored hair, popular with schoolmates at Greenwood Village Elementary School, loved for his jokes and generous passing by teammates on the Littleton Hockey Association’s “Squirts” team, and worshipped by Sam and Carly. Everyone in the family remarked on what a great big brother he was. He got more and more serious about hockey. One day when Norm was doing his daily sit-ups, push-ups, and dumbbell curls in the basement den after work, Alex left his brothers and sister watching TV and wandered over to see how many push-ups he could do, then how much weight he could lift. Soon he was jumping in regularly, just as Norm had once helped his own father push aside the coffee table for army-style calisthenics every weekday at 6:30 a.m.
As Alex’s coach on the Squirts team, Norm was putting him through further punishments each day at practice: sprints up and down the ice that left his teammates gasping in his wake. One afternoon at lunch with a friend of Norm’s who had just watched Alex play, the man’s young son asked Alex if he was going to be on the Colorado Avalanche when he grew up. Alex was just beginning to allow that there were a few other NHL teams he might be willing to settle for when Norm flashed him a sardonic grin that stopped him cold.
Norm likes to describe himself as a “realist.” In his coaching days he was unafraid to inform parents that their darling progeny had no future in competitive ice hockey. He intended it as a kindness. When some poor couple from Colorado Springs drove their no-talent hack an hour each day to practice with a Littleton team, Norm always took it on himself to inform them that if scouts were going to be interested, they would have called by now. “Because their kid can skate backward and they can’t skate at all, they’re thinking he’s got something special,” he explained to me once. “But just ’cause their kid is ten or twelve and can skate backward doesn’t mean he has a ticket to play in the NHL.”
Norm was careful to extend his hockey realism to his own children. When Max got to be ten years old, Norm suggested that he hang up the skates. Alex was different. He really loved the game, even if his talent was not world-class.
In the car ride home from lunch, Norm told Alex how it was. The NHL was Valhalla, Mount Olympus, the Forbidden City, inaccessible to mere mortals. Norm himself had been rudely disabused of his NHL ambitions when he got to college and saw what real hockey talent looked like. The only reason he could skate with former NHL players now was that with all the bike racing he did in the Rocky Mountains, his conditioning as a fortysomething commercial real estate broker was unmatched even by young pros. Maybe one guy out of everyone Alex had ever played against had a whisker of a chance. Was Alex the biggest, strongest kid on the ice? Could he skate backward faster than anyone he knew could skate forward? Did he have “dangles,” the talented stick handler’s uncanny ability to flip the puck back and forth through wormholes in space that no defender could follow? Alex shrugged, near tears, and guessed he didn’t. What he did have, Norm hastened to point out, with no little pride, was a phenomenal work ethic. As long as he was willing to keep twice as fit and twice as strong as any other kid and battle twice as hard for every puck, he would keep earning a place for himself as a “grinder”: a player who makes up for his mediocrity with toughness, team spirit, and willingness to do the less glamorous jobs on the ice.
As is common with Norm’s take on the world, his view of Alex’s hockey talent was gradually enshrined as common wisdom by everyone in his social universe, including Alex’s future coaches. To a man, in their letters to Judge Burgess, they would speak of their great personal love and admiration for Alex while taking pains to point out that he had no great aptitude for the game.
While not a “star” player … most dedicated player on the team … caring little for personal recognition …
Not the most skilled player on the team … constant pursuit of his personal growth and team accomplishments …
Talent he did not possess … had to get by on hard work …
You would never guess from their letters that by the end of high school Alex had earned a position on perhaps the best youth squad in Colorado, after consistently racking up team-high assists, and stood a good chance of a college hockey scholarship after a year or two in the junior leagues. Norm intended his “realism” lovingly, as a ward against the pain of disillusionment that he himself had felt, but ten-year-old Alex did not have that kind of perspective on his father and coach. He had always loved hearing Great-Uncle Bernie’s stories of training soldiers after the Korean War, but I think Norm’s dismissal of any chance that he would ever play professional hockey marked the moment when World War II subsumed the NHL as the arena of Alex’s dreams.
At first much of his interest centered on our grandfather, Al Senior, who fought as a sergeant in command of a pair of half-track 50mm machine guns in the army’s Fourth Infantry Division, landing in Normandy shortly after D-Day and punching Junkers, V-1s or doodlebugs, and Messerschmitts out of the sky above the hedgerows as the invasion pressed into the continent. The few stories Norm had passed on to Alex electrified him. While his fifth-grade classmates worked their way through Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, he began devouring Stephen Ambrose’s trilogy of military histories D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, and, his favorite, Band of Brothers, about the 101st Airborne Division’s elite Easy Company of paratroopers, who dropped behind German lines and assaulted heavily fortified machine-gun nests in advance of the landings at Omaha and Utah Beaches.
Ambrose