“It is very soothing, and Oleg has already paid for it, so it is free to you. Come, take off your clothes. You look tired. I will put you to sleep in no time.”
When Stan woke later that afternoon, he was again alone in his room. The Cup stood on the floor beside the bed where he himself had moved it. He felt rested and relaxed and his back was looser than it had felt in years. On the bedside table was a note written in green hotel pen ink.
Oleg wanted me to find out for him why you are called Two-Second Stanley. I will have to tell him I still do not know. Take care of yourself. Ana.
Stan first crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the Cup in order to escort it to Finland. This was in the 1970s, twenty years into his tenure as keeper of hockey’s championship prize. In the almost twenty years that then followed his first trip, Stan crossed the Atlantic Ocean at least once a year, often more than once. His cabin home on Lake Simcoe contained hockey pucks and shot glasses from Sweden, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and Russia. The Iceland trip was unplanned, an emergency refuelling stop on the way back from Norway. They were let off the plane to stretch and Stan had walked the trophy around the outpost tarmac, amazed at the rawness of the landscape. Jagged rock peaks surrounded the airport and steam rose from fissures in the land all around. He told himself he’d make a special trip back there someday, but never did.
Twice in his travels, Stan was detained at borders under the suspicion the Cup or its case was being used to smuggle something in or out of the country. In 1985, the Cup was confiscated at the airport in Prague. Stan stayed awake for thirty-six hours in an airport detention cell waiting to have the Cup returned to him, and then refused to board a plane until he himself was allowed to dismantle the trophy in the airport and make sure nothing had been altered or removed. Ten armed guards watched and laughed at the old man from Canada unscrewing the bowl from the top of the trophy and sticking his arm into it up to the shoulder, feeling around inside for whatever might have been left there in the time he had lost touch with it. When he pulled out a Czech flag, the room erupted into laughter and cheers.
Flashcubes bounced off polished silver. Smiling and shaking his head, Stan respectfully folded the flag and handed it to the nearest guard, but the armed man insisted he take it with him. Then in turn, as though somehow these men had not had enough of it in the preceding thirty-six hours, each guard ran his hand along the side of the Cup.
Over the years, Stan had removed hundreds of stickers and decals from the sides and especially the bottom of the Cup. He had untied countless neckties and pairs of suspenders attached beneath the bowl, fished out any number of folded notes and foreign bills slipped behind the nameplates, and unscrewed at least three false plates containing the names of local dignitaries, children and historical figures, one, in fact, bearing the name of the Pope. From the bowl, at the end of parties, Stan had removed pieces of cake, an entire roasted turkey, numerous cigars (some uncut and still in their wrappers), many sleeping cats, and exactly twenty-three pairs of panties, sixteen bras and three garter belts. Once, in Stockholm, he woke to discover the entire Cup, top to bottom, had been painted yellow.
Late in life, Stan calculated he had cleaned or polished the trophy approximately 4,560 times, an average of at least once a day, every day, four months of every year for thirty-eight years.
Since the day in 1952 he touched the Cup at centre ice in Toronto, he had touched it again an uncountable number of times. In the history of the Cup, no other person who has held, lifted or touched it more than Stan Cooper. He lifted it on and off airplanes, trains and ships. He rode with it in the back of an ox-drawn cart, the front of an ocean-going canoe, a hot-air balloon and four different cable cars.
In late August of 1991, the Cup was returning to Canada on a transatlantic flight from Moscow. Stan had spent a week in Russia, escorting the trophy to the celebrations of two different players. It had been an uneventful trip as foreign visits go. There was the usual unending supply of vodka to be poured from the bowl, but this time, thankfully, no one had vomited into it. At one party, Stan noticed two very well-dressed men about whom people whispered and pointed from the edges of the room.
There was something in the perfection of these men and in their easy disregard for everyone else, something that smelled of violence. Other people’s reactions to these men made Stan nervous for the Cup. But they seemed bored by the trophy; they ignored it and instead wandered the room in slow circles, boldly appraising the local girls with their eyes. The young Russian hockey player pulled Stan aside.
“Two-Second, don’t worry,” he said morosely. “They are here for my money, not your cup. They do their business as quietly as possible. Taking your cup would make too much noise. They don’t want to be noticed; they just want to be paid.”
Stan relaxed, and found himself experiencing an unexpected and unfamiliar pity for the young athlete. The older Stan got in his job, the less he had in common with the players who won the Cup. Though he’d never much participated in the shit slinging and underwear grabbing that seemed to entertain Cup-winners when he was a young man, at least they had shared a history as adults. With the kids he chaperoned later in his career, there was rarely anything of substance to be said, and he often could not even communicate with them. Their English vocabulary was held within the confines of the rink. Over the years as well, these young men became richer and richer, pushing an even greater divide between them and the older underpaid man who carried their trophy for them. What do you say to a boy in his early twenties who owns his own helicopter? How do you make small talk with the kid who buys prostitutes by the half-dozen?
But the Russians were often different. They liked their fun as much as anyone, but, as in the case of this young man, they had troubles their Canadian teammates could not guess at or imagine. With their giant paycheques came immense notoriety back home, and with the notoriety, trouble. In a country where a meal at the new Pizza Hut could cost a month’s wage, the salary of a hockey star was an obscene temptation. These players paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in protection for the privilege of returning home to an intact family. They themselves were never threatened. The local mobs would never cripple their winning horse. But the weight of generations of relatives hung around their necks. The flights to Moscow with the Cup were never quite as raucous as the flights to Moose Jaw or to Thunder Bay. And at this particular party, celebration of the Cup came second to celebration of the payoff.
Each new Cup-winning player in turn learned Stan’s hated nickname and used it endlessly despite objections. He was convinced half the kids didn’t even know why he was called “Two-Second” Stan, but they all liked the name, and liked even more that he so obviously hated it. With the foreign players, for some reason, it was often easier to remember “Two-Second” than his actual name, a convenience that meant, in other countries, he was introduced as a slim measurement of time.
In 1991, Valeri Berschin was one of the earliest young Russians to enjoy the curse of winning the Cup. On the ice, he was a goal-scoring surgeon, cutting past defenders with a combination of raw speed and brilliant fakery. Stan had been present for his game-winning goal in game five, a subtle backhand chip into the upper corner. The boy had not even been looking at the net, or the puck. In fact, he’d been looking at nothing at all. The slow-motion replays clearly showed a smiling Berschin with his eyes closed, scoring by instinct and feel. As the puck left the tip of his stick blade, he took the inevitable hit in front of the net, spun deftly on the toe of one skate and did not open his eyes until his back hit the end boards, his arms wide to receive an avalanche of teammates.
It was, in terms of raw skill and artistry, the greatest goal Stan had ever witnessed. And now the same young man stood by a table weighed down with food and drinks, sheepish in an uncomfortable-looking brown suit, the servant of two huge men with bad reputations. Stan waited until the evening wore on a bit louder and drunker, then approached Berschin.
“Look at the Cup, my boy,” he said.
The young man blinked and downed the last third of a tumbler of vodka. “Two-Second,” he said, smiling and drunk. “Yes, the Cup. What about it?”
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