His job required a colour-blindness, an inability to discern between flying shapes moving in and around the officials. For Stan, it required that he did not read the sports sections of newspapers and that he respond with the same nervous laugh to every half-begun conversation about hockey. The things he could not ignore—the weight of crowd noise in response to a team’s relative success or failure, the length of his working season (longer in playoff years), the buzz of traffic around Yonge and Carlton streets on Fridays, Saturdays and some mid-week evenings—these things that revealed the obvious to him, that his home team had a shot, that he might work the finals, he banished these things as best he could. Teams win championships, clocks tell time. Two separate and joined realities, but he had control over only one of them. He played time, and the game was his own. Black or white, binary, absolute. It ran or it stopped. He did not even watch the puck when it dropped for a faceoff. He watched the muscles of the official’s hand. It was the absence of a puck that set time moving again. A hand, suddenly empty.
Moving home through traffic, down Church Street to Queen and then out across the Don River Valley into lower Riverdale, he did not actually know who had won. The density of the air in the building at the moment of the final whistle would have told him enough, but he prided himself on not knowing the score. The referee controlled the score, while he just changed the numbers and then forgot what they meant. The hockey he actually watched was at home on Saulter Street where the raised CN tracks slanted across the roadway, cutting his whole neighbourhood off from the long flat approach to Lake Ontario.
In the impromptu cul-de-sac, kids came out nightly to run around passing and shooting old rubber balls. These games were untimed even by the sun, the shouts of children lasting well past any reasonable limitation imposed by darkness. On evenings he was home, Stan watched them from his front step, happily off the clock. And when it was obviously becoming too late to play, when mothers were starting to glance out windows, it was always “next goal wins.” Next goal wins, no matter the actual score—plunk that ball in the back of the net and it’s over. These kids didn’t care enough about their skills, didn’t feel their losses deeply enough to generate anything near the passion needed to get off the streets and onto skates in a professional arena. They were losers, and Stan loved watching losers play hockey. To him, it was the only pure form of the sport.
Toronto won the 1951 championship over Montreal in five games. To win a series in five indicates, if not a rout, certainly a singular dominance, the losing team managing to scratch out but one win in the entire series. A five-game series is a worse embarrassment for the losing team than a four-game sweep, because the lack of a sweep indicates there were flaws in the winning team, there were weaknesses to be exploited but your team didn’t exploit them. You had them all figured out for one game, but then you forgot what you had learned. They didn’t win; you lost. The last game Stan Cooper ever worked as official timekeeper was the third game of the 1951 finals.
The first two games of the series were played in Montreal, at the Forum on Sainte-Catherine Street. The Toronto team sickened all of Quebec with a surprise first-game victory. Montreal had beaten the powerful and favoured Detroit team four games to two in the semifinals, and was expected to win handily over an unfocused Toronto squad. But Toronto outworked and outhit their rivals, sending three players out of the game with injuries in the first period alone. That night, the visiting players were locked into their hotel by their head coach, Joe Primeau. They ate from room service and Primeau stood in the kitchen to watch it being prepared. A crowd of Montrealers gathered outside the hotel, shouting insults and burning blue and white sweaters in the streets.
Montreal’s only win in that championship series came the next night. Stan didn’t listen to the away games. He avoided all mention of how the team was doing in preparation for the three games he was to work at the arena. But there was no shouting on Queen Street late that night. No banging of pots on the front porches of his neighbourhood. He knew they had lost game two and that the series was tied. He worked in his garden that night, planting peas and tomatoes, and building a scaffold of wooden stakes for his beans to climb. A few minutes past ten, he chased a raccoon from his back shed. The moon was full, or he might have stepped on his rake and clobbered himself. Inside the house, his wife talked on the telephone. He stopped occasionally and listened for words, hearing “blue” and “Penetang” and “bristles.”
Game three cost Stan his job and a faith in things as they seem. Game three was fifty-nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds of business as usual for the clock-watcher and five seconds of timekeeping insanity. Game three was the end of Stan’s ten-year, childless marriage. The beginning of his irrational hatred for all things tartan. Game three finished Montreal at a spiritual level, broke their shins and left them shaking their heads and crying on the ice.
Montreal tied the score at two goals apiece at 19:27 of the final period. Before that goal, the air in the Gardens was sweetened with screaming voices and the discarded wrappings of thousands of ice cream sandwiches. At 19:25 the ice gleamed in that way that let Stan know he would be going home soon. Blue and white sweaters passed by him like darts while red sweaters drifted, collided, slammed into the glass. At 19:26 a stick blade hit the ice and shattered, sending both puck and wooden fragments toward the goal. At 19:27 the building lost its voice. The goalie had blocked the stick blade and let the puck slip under his arm. The red sweaters danced and Stan went through his time board checklist: minutes, seconds, home goals, visiting goals, period, penalty time. Minutes, seconds, home goals, visiting goals, period, penalty time.
More whistles blew and the black and white sweaters raced into a corner to break up a fight. The game might go into overtime. It could be a long night. The raccoons might get to his young tomato plants. He ran through the checklist and glanced at his wife’s seat. He looked at the seats he had given to his wife and his friend James Cole. They were easy to spot because Jim was wearing his ridiculous yellow plaid cap.
Stan had not looked from his scoreboard to the crowd in four years. He ran through the checklist. They were eating ice cream sandwiches, and smiling. His wife used her long nails to pull away the waxed paper from Jim’s disintegrating sandwich. Gold seats, on the aisle, for the two people he preferred among all people, save his mother who was no longer alive. He ran through the checklist and waited for the whistle, his finger on the switch. She laughed and wiped ice cream from the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin.
At 19:57 a whistle blew and all the sweaters glided back to the Montreal end to restart after the puck had been iced. The sweaters moved slowly, tired, saving whatever was left for overtime. The building was loud again. People banged on the glass as the sweaters passed. They were angry for resolution. They wanted it over. Stan let his eyes rise to his wife, her hand on Jim’s right knee, her nails clutching at the blue and white checked trousers in nervous anticipation. The sweaters stopped moving, and Jim’s hand landed on top of hers, softly, like it knew how to be there.
There was movement in the corner of his eye, a reflection on the far glass across the arena. Stan turned his head to the turmoil on the ice and at the same time pressed the button to start the clock, fully two seconds too late. At 19:59, the puck slipped across the line beneath a desperately outstretched glove and game three was over. The winning goal was scored one full second after the end of the third period.
Even in the empty cave of the crowd’s celebration, Stan understood he was not the only one who knew. The result stood, with deep resentment and complaint from the Montreal bench. The next night, Stan watched game four from the retired player’s box high above the north seats. Bill Barilko’s heroics in game five carried the controversy of Stan’s two-second blunder out of the papers. The disappearance of the young defender during a fishing trip that summer buried it forever. The 1951 finals, which could easily have been known as the Stan Cooper finals, instead went to the body of Barilko, lost on the bottom of some northern lake.
Two
“You know that guy who gets knocked flat at the blue line because he’s looking at his skates instead of watching the forechecker—the guy who finds himself pleased to remember his own name about ten minutes later while the team doctor is stitching parts of his face? That was me.”
Stan