Page 85 of Keeper
“Years ago,” I said with a scoff.
“Tell me about it.”
“I was trying to find my way through the minors. And she …” I trailed off, not wanting to dredge up the painful past.
“Who was she?” she asked, patiently urging me to continue.
“My high school sweetheart.”
“Aw, really?”
I nodded. “First love, too.”
“Which rarely ends well,” she said, quoting me from earlier. Smart girl was one step ahead of me. “So what happened?”
“Long story short, she lost faith in me. So we broke up. And ever since, I haven’t wanted to commit to anybody.”
“Okay, wait. How’d she lose faith in you? Did you cheat on her?”
I shook my head. “No, never. She lost faith that I’d be an NHL goalie.”
“What? Really?” she said, bewildered. “How shallow. I bet she regrets that now. What was she thinking? You’re obviously good enough to make it.”
“I wasn’t always good enough, though,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s the whole point. I took for granted how much work it actually took to get to this level—I thought I was skilled enough I should just be gifted a job or a second chance. Doesn’t work like that. I don’t know how much you know about the development of hockey players—”
She stifled a laugh. “Zero, Tanner.”
“Put it to you like this, then. Out of all the positions on the ice, a goaltender typically takes the longest to cook in the development leagues before he’s finally ready to play in the NHL.”
“Why?” she asked.
“It’s the nature of the position.” I tapped my head. “Goaltending is mostly mental. Biggest thing for a goalie to be successful is to have confidence and composure—because once we get scored on, we have to forget it and move on so we’re ready to face the next shot. And it’s not easy to have that ability until you’ve experienced the highest of highs and survived the lowest of lows. You mightthinkyou have it, but you don’t, not until you’ve been through hell and back.”
“So what was your hell?”
“I’ll tell you what Ithoughtmy hell was: I was on the verge of getting an NHL call-up with New York, the team that drafted me, when I came down with mono.”
“Ugh! Mono—the worst!” she said. “I got it in high school and it wrecked my life for half the school year. I can’t even imagine how difficult mono would be for an athlete to deal with.”
“It was awful. It took me out for six months, and even then, I didn’t feel right when I finally came back the next year. I lost twenty pounds of muscle, I lost my speed and sense of timing, but even worse, I lost my confidence. The NHL was out of the question until I found my game again, so I spent that next season riding the bus down in the AHL.”
“Is the AHL like the minor leagues?”
“Yeah, the AHL is the development league of the NHL,” I said. “But even that next year, my adjustment to life after mono wasn’t going well. I was posting worse and worse numbers. Another year flew by with similar results. The whispers up in New York started to grow louder: my development was officially stalling. The NHL club started losing hope in me, so they began to stocking their goalie pipeline with other prospects. Suddenly, I found myself as the fourth or fifth goalie on the organizational depth chart. Playing time was harder to come by—and when Ididplay, the results weren’t pretty. Wasn’t long before the hockey world started openly calling me a ‘bust’—in other words, a prospect who’d failed to reach his potential and would never turn out. In just a few years, I’d gone from a promising prospect to a nobody. Everyone had given up on me.” I paused. “Including the first love of my life. The girl who swore to stick by my side, no matter what,didn’t.When things got bad, she dumped me over a text message an hour before my game. All because she thought my career was dead in the water and I wasn’t going to make the NHL.”
Ainsley huffed. “What a bitch!”
“I was crushed. Let in nine goals that night. Got demoted to the ECHL afterward. My hockey career was all but over. I’d hit rock bottom.”
“Shereallydumped you all because your hockey career wasn’t going well?!” she asked, outraged on my behalf.
I nodded. “And I’m thankful for it. Because if that’s the kind of person she really was, then she did me a favor. Really, I dodged a bullet.”
“So how’d you make it back?”
“Wasn’t easy,” I said. “I was a newly single guy playing in front of a couple hundred fans in Boise, Idaho, of all places—hundreds of miles away from my friends and family. Just like everyone else, I thought my career was over. I had nothing to lose—nothing.Night after night, I went out and battled, pouring my heart out on the ice like I was playing my last game—because each game very well could’ve been my last. A beast is most dangerous when he’s cornered, right? Slowly, surely, I started piecing my game back together again. It certainly didn’t happen overnight. But I battled hard and rebuilt my game and my confidence one game at a time. Slowly, success started to come, and I started to believe in myself again. And I began to realize what had held me back all along was this idea that I was good enough to beoweda pro career. I wasn’t. Nobody’s owed anything. You have to earn every single minute of ice time. And you do that by making one save at a time. It took a couple years, but eventually, I got traded to the Dallas Devils and, after grinding my way through their farm system, they took a chance on me. I won the job in training camp and here I am.”
“That’s incredible,” she said, a glimmer in her eyes.
