The first concussion in the year of concussions was delivered by the right fist of a man whose name I either don’t know or can’t remember. You could say it was a mild concussion, and I always will, but many experts say that there’s no such thing. You have a concussion or you don’t. You can’t be mildly pregnant. But a brain injury is not a baby. We know what a baby is.
I didn’t lose consciousness, or even my footing. When it was over, I skated away, with a ludicrous grin but without every item of my equipment or all of my wits. I had a sudden headache and a sense already of an alteration in the fabric of the world beyond the confines of my skull. Teammates leered at me. Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks. The referee bent to report the infractions to the timekeeper, through a slot in the glass. In the penalty box, I fought the urge to lie down.
This was men’s league—beer league. You play hockey, then you drink beer. Beer in the locker room, beer in the parking lot, beer at the bar. Specifically, this was Game One of the league final, best of three, early July, 2016, after a sixteen-game season and a couple of playoff rounds. We all cared more than we should have. We ranged in age from just-out-of-college to my-kid’s-applying-to-college, with varying degrees of organized-hockey experience. I was one of the oldest, and one of the least experienced—I’d quit in freshman year of high school—but I’d never stopped skating in pickup games. I’d been a beer leaguer for twenty-five years and could still contribute here and there, and even, with crafty editing, create a mind’s-eye reel of my highlights to play as I drifted off to sleep.
Our team was called the Intangibles, for the sports cliché describing that unquantifiable quality of grit and attention to detail which valuable players, especially older ones, are often said to have, and which we reckoned was all we had left, amid a general decline in fitness and skill. On our jerseys, black, with a little orange and white, the word “Intangibles” ran diagonally from top left to bottom right. On the back: numbers, but no names. Most of us wore matching socks, black with orange trim. The rest of the gear—helmets, gloves, pants—was ragtag. A motley militia, in the reeking regalia of past schools and teams. The games were at night, sometimes as late as midnight. We got a little nervous on game day. We perfected the timing of the nap and the meal. We stretched at home. We knew we were ridiculous, and made fun of ourselves constantly, but approached it all with enough sincerity to wring real gratification out of it. A good beer-league team consists of players who take it no more or less seriously than you do. Ours was a good team. Afterward, we could talk about a game for hours—about our own failings, in front of the others, and about the others’ failings, behind their backs.
What led to the first concussion? I’d decided to repay an opponent who had, during a battle for a loose puck, shoved me into the boards head first. I’d been having neck issues, and this had made them instantly worse. Ours was a no-checking league, and yet we were allowed to play the body, as they say, and hostilities bubbled up from time to time. Now the game was basically over, and we were losing by several goals with a minute left. Fuck it. As the guy stole the puck from our captain and bore in uncontested on our goalie, I came off the bench on a line change (a player substitution, often mid-play) and skated toward him as hard as I could. I came at him from his blind side, and arrived just as he slowed up a touch to execute a feint on our goaltender. My check blew him off his skates.
This was an uncool thing to do. Even in the pros, it would have been at least a charging penalty; in a middling no-hit beer league, it was beyond the pale. Also, the guy was much bigger, stronger, and younger than I was. He rose to his feet and rushed at me. I stood still, hands at my sides, in wonderment at the size of him, and at the purity of the grievance. I had an inkling that I deserved what was coming. His head was the size of a bucket. He shook his gloves off and quickly landed a series of right hooks before my teammates swarmed him, like rodeo clowns. The punches caught me behind the left ear, below the edge of my helmet. The thud was thicker than I’d expected. It felt as if my head had been slammed in a car door.
I had never punched, or been punched by, an adult before. The last time I’d used my fists was on my younger brother, during a tussle in our early teens; he retaliated by pelting me with a boom box. It got me in the mouth. I should have learned then: put up your dukes. The next morning, a dentist levered my teeth back into place with a tongue depressor and cemented them in line. I showed up for freshman year of high school with a mangled upper lip and a smile made of grout.
After the Game One punch-up, I sat out the rest of the series. I didn’t feel right. We won without me. The rink manager handed the guys a yard-tall plastic trophy, which wound up on the bar of the tavern where we hung out after the games. I was a longtime fan of the Philadelphia Flyers, who in their heyday and my formative years were known as the Broad Street Bullies, for their use of physical intimidation as a tactic. So I allowed myself to believe, half seriously, that I’d contributed something. The boys encouraged me in this. I’d sacrificed my services, and my head, to change the complexion of the series. One intangible is knowing when to be a jackass.
I skate low, torso over toes, head turtled forward. It’s not awful, but it’s not ideal, either. I catch a lot of stray elbows. It’s hard to count the times, after those late-night games, that I’ve felt dazed the next day. Headaches, stiff neck, trouble finding words. But then there were always other variables: beer, dehydration, a severe shortage of sleep. Stay out or go home, six pints or two, I always needed four hours, from the time of the opening face-off, before I could fall asleep. Midnight games on Mondays left a mark.
After a day or two, the fog would lift. Nothing ever stuck, and so I decided that those passing head shots, the little dings, weren’t anything at all. It seemed a small price to pay for the weekly company of the boys. There was the Brad, a master rigger of industrial cranes, whose gruff diatribes against bankers, bike lanes, hipsters, and “harelips” we surreptitiously recorded, for laughs. Pat (Patty) Patterson had grown up down the block from me; in the late seventies, our local street-hockey game had made the Daily News. We had a couple of smooth Minnesotans—Scoobs, a soulful bull of a kid who ran a charter school in Harlem, and Mahonze, our ringer from Duluth, lanky and shy. And some spicy Mainers, too: Brawny, who was always grumbling about the libs; Bix, who smelled like a dead animal; and Junta, whom I met playing roller hockey in Tompkins Square Park, in the mid-nineties, and who had a thing about the size of his own wrench, which, admittedly, was prodigious. New recruits were always amazed to learn that Phish had named its first album for him. He came up with a lot of the nicknames, some of which only he used. Our goalie, whom we called Z, had eight children and lived in a shoe. Or so it was said.
Hockey nicknames are determined by an esoteric set of principles, the most basic one being that you add a long “e” to a name that does not have one, and drop it if it does. Clarke was Clarkie, Gretzky was Gretz. The Intangibles called me Dickie, for Dickie Dunn, the beat writer in the movie “Slap Shot.” For us, as for a generation of hockey players, “Slap Shot” was both a mirror and a prompt, in the way that “The Godfather” was for the Mob. There’s a scene in a bar in which Dickie tells Reg Dunlop, the player-coach played by Paul Newman, “I tried to capture the spirit of the thing.” We were all about the spirit of the thing. We took turns doing the post-game writeups: mock heroics, gong shows, choice chirps. Our team’s captain, for a while, was a handyman for a bunch of wealthy tenants of Upper East Side town houses; reared in Detroit, he’d played college hockey at Liberty University, during a born-again-Christian phase, and then, as a pot-smoking apostate, had been Woody Allen’s superintendent. He made paintings and signed them “Evryman.” We called him Reg. One year, after we won a league championship, I e-mailed my brother a team photo. The trophy, the flushed faces, the thinning hair. My brother singled out a Philly kid we called Murph—for Audie Murphy, because his surname contained the letters “a-u-d” (and no long “e”)—or Jesus, because he performed miracles. “That guy looks like a tough dick,” my brother wrote. I shared this e-mail with a few of my teammates. From then on, Reg implored us from the bench to play with an edge: “Tough dicks, boys. Tough dicks.” Hockey, it needs to be said, brings out the dickishness in us all. It may even require it.
In New York City, in the nineteen-seventies, when I was a kid, recreational ice hockey was a curiosity, an obscure pastime of hard-nosed Long Islanders, Massholes, preppies, and Hell’s Kitchen roughnecks. There was a men’s league at the old Sky Rink, on the sixteenth floor of an office building near the West Side rail yards; one misremembers it now, with its steamed-up windows and its hothouse violence, as a kind of puckhead’s Plato’s Retreat. There were rugged barns at Coney Island, Long Beach, and the World’s Fair site in Queens. During the winter months, I skated in Central Park and the Bronx, getting just a handful of weekend games in the suburbs each season. In summer, I went to hockey camps for a couple of weeks, in New England and Nassau County. But mostly I played roller hockey—pre-Rollerblades, on the old quads. The city had a lot more open asphalt than open ice. We used garbage cans for goals, a roll of electrical tape for a puck, and wooden sticks with the blades worn down by the pavement to the width of paint stirrers. The pace was slow, and nobody wore shin pads or helmets. Still, the games got chippy. My sharpest memory is of a full baseball swing I took to the back of a knee from the stick of a neighborhood bully known as Fat Allie.
Thirty years later, I was out mucking it up on the ice two or three nights a week—at Chelsea Piers, mainly, but also in Long Island City, Flushing, and Central Park, in leagues and in regular pickup games. It was my outlet, my social life, my private map of New York. One team blended into the next: Flin Flon, Team X, Red Army, Blind Justice, Lady Blue, Wheat Kings, Rink Rats, Polar Bears, Blackjacks, Hit Factory, Triple Canopy, LCHC (Lamb Chop Hockey Club), and THC, which, of course, stood for the Hockey Club.
Meanwhile, my sons got deep into organized travel hockey, the weekends a blur of games and practices. For a number of years, I helped out as a coach. To do so, I had to take a series of seminars and online modules, including a perennial refresher devoted to concussions, with strategies for getting children to provide an accurate accounting of their symptoms. But, when it came to self-diagnosis, those were superfluous.
I got the next concussion that fall, in a game in Central Park, at the outdoor rink where I’d learned to play, four decades earlier. This was a league for players older than forty. The team was called Tiger Williams, for a notorious goon. On a chilly night under the lights by the Harlem Meer, with friends on both teams, the mandate was to play it cool. Skating backward, defending, without much conviction, against an onrushing forward, I leaned to execute an over-fortyish poke check. The forward, maybe with too much conviction, cut hard and caught the side of my head with a shoulder. The contact helicoptered me into the air and then down to the ice. I stayed prone awhile, then made my way to the locker room, where I undressed and zombied my way home. Headache, vertigo, unrelenting fatigue: the symptoms reminded me of altitude sickness. I acclimated after a moment or two. I took six weeks off, and then resumed skating after Christmas.
The third concussion came months later, in another Intangibles game, the clock running out on a late-night midseason loss. A freak accident, a collision with a teammate: we hadn’t seen each other. I got the worst of it. The light dimmed, the ringing kicked up, and the fog rolled in again.
In the following weeks, my skull felt as though someone had draped a towel over it and was pulling down on all four corners, or maybe cinching tight a bank robber’s stocking. I had trouble concentrating. If I tried to exercise, the headache came galloping in. I couldn’t handle crowds or concerts or the ordinary din of New York. The thought of playing hockey, the sight of men playing football on TV: it seemed as reasonable to stroll on foot across the New Jersey Turnpike. After an hour or two in front of a computer screen, a kind of dizzy fatigue washed over me. I began napping a couple of times a day. The Advil stopped working. My moods darkened. My work stalled.
At the urging of family and friends, I went to see a doctor, who said that the symptoms were consistent with post-concussion syndrome. Still, a diagnosis is an approximation. An M.R.I. showed nothing, except some other things, which had nothing to do with concussions or my symptoms, and which I’d probably have preferred not to know about: White matter intensity is generally preserved, however a solitary probable chronic lacunar infarction is present in the right caudate head, and trace probable microangiopathy is present in the parietal region on the left. A neurologist told a friend, to whom I had sent the report, “He shouldn’t freak out (too much).”
I was familiar with the murk of concussion science. Like anyone who follows sports, I’d been reading for years about professional athletes undone by head injuries, marooned in the dark, mulling suicide. One knew about C.T.E., the disease of progressive neurodegeneration, brought on by repeated blows to the head, that seemed disproportionately to afflict boxers and football and hockey players, such as the linebacker Junior Seau, who shot himself in the chest, at the age of forty-three, or Todd Ewen, the N.H.L. enforcer known as the Animal, who shot himself in the head, at forty-nine. One of my son’s coaches, a retired N.H.L. player and a gentle giant who participated in more than a hundred fights as a pro, had several episodes a year of overpowering vertigo that lasted for days. Of course, I hadn’t done any of this. I hadn’t even played high-school hockey. I was just a mildly rambunctious boy on planet Earth: bicycle crashes, skiing accidents, pitiless shore breaks, a drunken tussle or two. But it was widely accepted that the damage accrues.
I bore witness as the kids opened their own accounts. In a peewee practice, one of my sons collided with a teammate, and the other boy had to quit hockey and miss months of school. I attended a concussion-awareness fund-raiser at his parents’ apartment, featuring a former professional football player and the former pro wrestler Chris Nowinski, who suffered sixteen concussions and now runs a research-and-advocacy group called the Concussion Legacy Foundation. This is an epidemic, they told us. There’s so much we don’t know. When in doubt, keep them out. The youth-hockey organization my sons played in adopted something called the King-Devick test. At the beginning of the season, we took the kids aside, one at a time, and had them perform cognitive exercises while an adult timed them with a stopwatch. Patterns of numbers on flip cards, read aloud, in sequence. This established a baseline. The idea was that, if a player was suspected of having a concussion, we’d administer the test on the bench and compare it with the previous result, and thereby have some basis for a decision about his continued participation in the game.
One day, during a game on Long Island, a boy on our squirt team (squirts are nine- and ten-year-olds) got clocked in front of our bench. The referee saw it but gave no indication that he considered it a penalty. Home cooking? The visitors always think so. Our player lay on the ice. From the stands, his father started shouting at the referee, who skated over and told him to knock it off. The father yelled, “That’s my son!” Then he let loose with some obscenities. The referee ordered him to leave the rink. The father went quietly, which was a relief, because he had a black belt in judo. Another father went with him, to make sure.
On the bench, I took the boy aside to administer the King-Devick test. He had put up a conspicuously slow time on his baseline. He was immensely talented but easily distracted: sometimes, when a coach explained a drill to him, his vacant expression brought to mind the badger sidekick in the movie “Fantastic Mr. Fox”—eyes just spirals. Now the boy sat on the bench, facing away from the ice, and read out the number patterns. He got through them much faster than he had for his baseline. This scenario hadn’t come up in the pre-season tutorials. We sent him back on the ice, which was almost certainly the wrong thing to do. The game ended in a tie.
During a bantam game (bantams are thirteen and fourteen), at a rink on the top floor of a mall in West Nyack, one of our players got rifled into the boards. His head bounced off the plexiglass. He stayed down. The referees blew the play dead and stood nearby, dawdling like a pair of plainclothes detectives at a crime scene. The players retreated and took a knee. In street shoes, I made my way across the ice. This boy’s father had played in the N.H.L. and was in the Hall of Fame. Hundreds of goals, thousands of penalty minutes, dozens of fights. A legend. But he wasn’t there that day. His son was lying face down, as though on a massage table. I asked the boy how he was doing.
“I’m done,” he said.
“Do you know where we are?”
“Some shitty mall.”
Lucid. Droll. Good to go? We held him out, without subjecting him to the numbers.
Years before, I’d been in the stands at Madison Square Garden when his father, playing for the Rangers, collided with an opponent head on head, neither seeing the other. Paramedics spent more than five minutes trying to revive him, as the arena went quiet. “Is he dead, Daddy?” my older son, then six, asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I could hardly speak, being somehow on the verge of tears. After a while, the crowd started chanting the man’s nickname. That’s what brought him back to consciousness, he later said. He was wheeled off on a stretcher. He missed fifteen games, then returned in time for the playoffs, and played for another two years. He stayed in the city and signed his son up for our program. He helped coach. You could see the opposing coaches and parents sneaking glances. On tournament trips, as kids raised hell in the corridors of the hotel, the hockey dads and moms gathered around him at the bar and pumped him for insights and anecdotes, a prince among the plebes. He liked to stay up late, too. An old habit, perhaps, from his playing days.
The symptoms lingered and mutated and became almost commonplace, and I began to contemplate retirement. That word, however facetiously it was deployed—because to consider the beer leagues a career, even in jest, was grandiose—had a finality that got marbled up with whatever depression the concussions had brought on. I missed skating, making plays, throwing my body around. I missed the boys. I missed the post-game high, endorphins giving way to beer and refrigerator raids.
A few months after my third concussion, a teammate, Mango, got one, too. We had chemistry on the ice, and liked talking and thinking the game, on our way to and from the rink. We were nerds for puck support and a methodical approach in the offensive zone. He was attacked in a melee at the final buzzer. Such things were much rarer than I have made them out to be, but here it was, violence that was not cartoonish. This time, there were no rodeo clowns. Maybe the Intangibles had lost sight of the intangibles. A lot of guys had moved away or stopped showing up. Injuries, work, babies, the burbs. Colorado, Chicago, Minneapolis. Ribs, disks, ankles, brains. Jesus had a heart attack. Scoobs’s house burned down. The spirit of the thing: catch it if you can.
Mango’s symptoms lasted for more than a year. Before long, he had to quit. So did Junta and Mahonze. The team disbanded. Now we were the invisibles, a chunk of our city life eliminated by blows to the head. My sticks stand blade down in a corner of the apartment; now and then, I catch a whiff of the old hockey-glove stink that still saturates the knob of cloth tape at the butt end of each one. I feel well enough to entertain the idea that there’s got to be a game for me somewhere out there in the city, one peppy enough to make it worthwhile yet so moderate as to be safe. Will I never again collide with another human being? The thought is hard to bear. When I can’t sleep, I have a habit of imagining myself, over and over, crossing the red line and, with a flick of the curved blade, flipping the puck high in the air, over the opposing defensemen and into the corner, but then, instead of chasing it, swerving toward the bench to get a line change. ♦
An earlier version of this story misstated when the accompanying photograph of the Intangibles was taken.
