Nobody Had Worn Number 14 Since My Brother Died

I was the one in the lobby

Let me start by being clear about who I am, because it matters.

I do not play hockey. I have never played hockey. I grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan where the rink was the actual centre of civilisation, and I spent roughly eleven years of my childhood in the lobby of that rink doing homework at a plastic table that smelled like wet mitts and burnt coffee, waiting for my brother.

Dean played. Dean played from four years old until the day he died at thirty-one.

I was the one in the lobby. I want that on the record because for a long time I thought it meant I was not part of it. It took a tournament and about forty volunteers to teach me that the lobby is part of it. The lobby might be the biggest part of it.

Dean

He was two years older than me and he was, frankly, not a very good hockey player.

I can say that now. For about six years after he died I could not say it, because you are not allowed to say anything true about a dead person, only nice things, and the nice things are always somehow a lie.

He was slow. He had bad hands. He was a beer league defenceman at thirty-one because that was as far as it was ever going to go, and he knew that at seventeen, and here is the thing I loved about him: he did not care even slightly. He turned up. Tuesdays and Thursdays, ten fifteen at night, minus thirty-two outside, for fourteen years, in a rink where the heater in the changing room only worked if you hit it.

He wore 14. He wore 14 because he was born on the fourteenth and because, in his words, all the good numbers were taken by guys who could actually skate.

He died in April, on a highway, and it was not his fault, and that is all I am going to say about that part because that part is not the story. Every family has that part. It is the most boring and most terrible chapter and it is not what I remember him for.

The first Tuesday after

Here is what I remember.

The first Tuesday after the funeral, his team played. Of course they played. Nobody cancels beer league, and I do not say that bitterly, I say it with love. They played, and I did not go, and Dean's buddy Rob called me at midnight, which is when their game ends, and he was clearly not entirely sober and he said, Sam, we left his spot on the bench.

I said, what.

He said, on the bench. Where he sits. Nobody sat there.

And then he cried down the phone at me for about four minutes and I let him, and it was the first time I had cried since it happened, standing in my kitchen in Saskatoon at midnight with a man I had met twice.

That is where this whole thing started, though I did not know it for another five years.

Five years of nothing

I did not do anything for five years. I want to say that because people who organise things always tell the story like they had a vision. I did not have a vision. I had a very slow, very quiet, very stubborn feeling that would not go away.

The feeling was this: nobody was wearing 14.

The team had never officially retired it, because it is a beer league team in a small town in Saskatchewan and they do not have a rafter to hang anything from and the whole idea would have made every single one of them uncomfortable. But new guys came, and every new guy picked a number, and somehow for five years, not one of them picked 14. Nobody ever said anything. It just did not get picked.

I found that out at a wedding. Rob mentioned it in passing, like it was nothing. And I went and stood outside in the parking lot in my dress in October and I was absolutely furious and I could not tell you why.

I think I was furious because it was going to fade. Because eventually somebody would pick 14 and not know, and that would be right and fair and correct and I could not stand it.

So I did the only thing I know how to do

I am an office manager. That is my job. I am the person who makes things happen on a spreadsheet.

I could not play hockey for my brother. I could not do the one thing he loved. But I can book an ice rental. I can build a schedule. I can chase forty men for money.

So in the January I called Rob and I said, I want to do a tournament. And there was a long pause and he said, oh thank God, we have been waiting for you to say that for five years.

Which absolutely floored me. They had been waiting. Nobody had said anything to me because they all assumed it was mine to start and they did not want to intrude on my grief, and I had not started because I assumed nobody would come.

So that was four years lost to good manners. Very Canadian. Very us.

The tournament

Eight teams the first year. Eight. I had budgeted for four and hoped for three.

Guys came from Regina. A guy came from Fort McMurray, drove nine hours, a man who had played with Dean in atom hockey when they were nine years old and had not seen him in twenty years. He walked into that lobby, my lobby, the one with the plastic tables, and he saw the photo we had put up and he took his cap off. Grown man. Took his cap off in a rink lobby.

I did not sleep for a week beforehand. I had a binder. My husband still makes fun of me about the binder.

And in the middle of all the actual logistics, the ice time and the reffing and the fact that we had to borrow nets and the insurance question that nearly killed me, the thing that turned out to matter most was the shirts.

The shirts

I want to explain this properly, because when I say it out loud it sounds trivial and it was not trivial, it was the whole thing.

I decided every single player would wear 14. Every team, every player, all eight teams, all of them, 14 on the back. And the name above the number would not be Dean's name. It would be each player's own name.

Rob thought I had lost it. He said, Sam, nobody will be able to tell who is who.

I said, exactly. That is exactly the point.

Because that was Dean's whole entire deal. He was not a hockey player. He was a guy who showed up. That is a completely interchangeable thing and it is also the only thing that has ever mattered in that building. Any of them could have been him. That was the point.

I had never ordered custom jerseys in my life. I know spreadsheets. I did not know a single thing about fabric or cuts or sizing or the fact that hockey guys, and I say this with total affection, will all order the wrong size out of pure optimism.

I learned a lot very fast. I learned that you have to decide about the numbers on the sleeves, which I had not thought about at all. I learned that a size chart is a suggestion and that you should add about fifteen percent to whatever a forty-year-old man tells you he wears. I learned that a sublimated jersey and a twill jersey are not the same animal and cost differently and last differently.

Mostly what I learned is that the whole business of custom hockey jerseys turns on one boring thing, which is whether the person on the other end actually reads your email. That is it. That is the whole review. I dealt with three places and two of them sent me a price and one of them sent me a question, and the question was, do you want the number matte or gloss, and I did not know there was a difference, and that is how I picked.

The guy on the phone, when I finally explained why every jersey said 14, went quiet for a second. Then he said, that is a good idea. That is all he said. Then straight back to talking about lead times.

I appreciated that more than any sympathy card I got.

We did shirts for the volunteers too. My mother wanted something for the ladies doing the canteen, because in Saskatchewan there is always a canteen and it is always run by women in their sixties who have been doing it since 1987 and who will absolutely tell you if you have got the chili wrong. So we got T-Shirt Printing done for the canteen crew and my mother wore hers for about two years afterwards, to the grocery store, to church, everywhere, until it was basically transparent.

The moment

Saturday morning, first game, eight o'clock.

Both teams skate out. Sixteen guys in the warmup. Every single one of them, 14.

And my mother, who had not been in that rink since the funeral, who I had frankly not been sure would come, was standing at the glass. And she put her hand on it.

I was up in the stands with my binder because I was terrified something would go wrong. And I watched my mother watch twenty-something guys skating in circles with her son's number on all of them, and she stood there with her hand flat on the glass for the whole warmup. Did not move. Fifteen minutes.

Afterwards she said, I could not tell which one he was.

And I said, that is the point, Mom.

And she said, no. You do not understand. For fifteen minutes, I could not tell which one he was.

I have not been able to say much about that sentence for the last four years.

Nine years now

We have done it nine times. It is sixteen teams now, we have outgrown the rink, and we are going to have to make a decision about that which I am dreading.

We raise money for the minor hockey program, so that a family who cannot afford to put a kid in hockey can put a kid in hockey, which is expensive in a way that people outside this country do not understand.

And two years ago, a nineteen year old kid, a real prospect, actual hands, the kind of player my brother never was in his life, joined Dean's old team and asked for 14.

Rob called me. He was in a state. He said he did not know what to say to him.

And I said, give it to him.

Because that is nine years of being a woman in a lobby with a binder. It was never about keeping a number empty. It was about making sure that when somebody finally put it on, they knew whose it had been. And that kid knew. He knew before he asked. He asked because he knew.

He wears it now. He is quite good.

Dean would have found that hilarious.