I Am Nobody. Greg Gilhooly

      “No.”

      “Well, I understand you. Only somebody like me can understand you. People like us, we need to stick together and help each other.”

      He would never let too much time go by between our meetings, but he was also never so in my face that it became off-putting. He walked a delicate line between keeping me on a string and appearing to allow me to move on with other aspects of my life with other people. He was able to maintain an emotional hold on me, and I would increasingly ask for less and less time to pass until we could get together again to talk. Yes, in a way, getting together became my idea. His time was now something he was doling out in limited amounts while I craved more. Not only did have me on a string, he had me swimming toward him.

      Graham started revealing himself to me. He told me that he believed that he was misunderstood, that he was a good guy but that many people seemed to be insecure around him, almost in awe of his education and coaching talent. What he hated most, he said, was having to dumb himself down in certain circles to be accepted. He was frustrated that he was in many ways a loner dedicated to making the game of hockey better. He never understood how sportswriters, especially Jack Matheson of the Winnipeg Tribune, could keep their jobs after supporting goon hockey. He thought it was unfair that sportswriters, who, he said, generally knew nothing about hockey, had the right to comment about anything to do with the game. He believed they were hurting the game, and once told me that the definition of a sportswriter was somebody who had failed English but could remember the winner of the last twenty Stanley Cups.

      That was Graham. He would say anything to make a point that served his immediate interests and made him look better than everybody else. He was trying to get me to see that he was smarter and funnier than everyone else while appealing to my intellect and my sense of humor.

      It worked. More and more I wanted to be like him.

      Graham sympathized with me, saying that people like my father, who had dropped out of school before high school, could never understand people like us, people who lived a different life inside our heads. One night at dinner, my dad was talking about somebody’s son who was in engineering at university. He couldn’t understand why somebody would go to university to learn how to work on a train. I just nodded and looked away. But I laughed with Graham about it, thinking that he understood me and cared about me. I laughed with my eventual abuser about a perceived shortcoming in my dad. I can’t ever take that back.

      Graham told me he could help me develop to the point where he could get me a scholarship to an Ivy League school. He could develop me. He could get me something. It was now all about what he could do for me and how I needed him to get what I wanted. Except, there’s no such thing as an athletic scholarship to an Ivy League school, not that I knew anything about that at the time (there is need-based financial aid, which often amounts to virtually total funding when a student-athlete comes from a family with a low income like mine). A simple sentence, but one with so much embedded in it, designed to position him between me and my dreams. Yet, all I could see at the time was that he was encouraging me to chase my goals.

      Near the end of one of our meals at the restaurant he was very clear: “Look me in the eyes. Look hard. I believe in you. You can do this. It doesn’t just have to be a dream. But it will require commitment. You’re going to need a lot of help. Nobody makes it without a lot of help. But I believe in you. You have every right to succeed, no matter who doesn’t believe you can do this, no matter who believes this is beyond what somebody like you can achieve. I believe in you. We can do this.”

       No matter who doesn’t believe in me?

       No matter who believes this is beyond me?

       Somebody like me?

      I felt panic. My body tightened and my ears started to ring. What didn’t I know about myself that he knew? Who was he speaking with who had told him I wasn’t good enough? Maybe my dad had been right all along.

      But at the same time, I could see in his eyes that he believed in me, that my goals were attainable, that he accepted me, that he understood me. I was starting to believe that maybe I had found my place, that here was someplace I belonged, that I had finally found my true home.

      I didn’t see the dead eyes of a shark hunting its prey. Instead, I saw the compassionate eyes of somebody who knew what was going on inside my head because, in his telling of his story, he too had been a brilliant student and a top athlete, and nobody but people like us could understand just how difficult it is to be a jock in a geek’s world and a geek in a jock’s world.

      “People like us”—those words haunt me still.

      Maybe the problem was that I wasn’t enough of a jock to truly be a jock? Maybe I wasn’t enough of a geek to truly be a geek? Maybe I was nowhere, lost, and without his help and guidance I would always be lost, alone, one of a kind? Maybe I was just nothing special? He understood me, he knew what it was like to be caught between two worlds, he would help me with both worlds. I was one of a kind, but he was too, so the two of us would be one of a kind. “People like us have to stick together to help each other,” he said.

      “People like us…”

      After a short while, everything he said made perfect sense to me. He was increasingly becoming the major voice and guiding light in my life, and I was slowly becoming isolated from the people closest to me. My coaches couldn’t know, my family couldn’t know, the others on my team couldn’t know about our relationship, and that was pretty much it for me at that time. If any of them ever found out, it would be all over.

      And Graham was dangling a pretty big carrot in front of me for immediate gratification. The older team in our area that Graham coached, the Midget (sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds) St. James Canadians, was in contention to represent Manitoba in the Air Canada Cup (now Telus Cup), the national Midget hockey championship. Graham told me that if his team qualified, it would have an expanded roster for the tournament. He thought I should be added, given the potential need for a third goalie for the tournament and his belief in my abilities. I was shocked, as that would mean he’d be lifting me two levels, bypassing the two AAA goalies in the age group ahead of where I was playing, two goalies who were also highly regarded.

      Graham’s team did qualify for the Air Canada Cup. It was held in, of all places, Winnipeg that spring of 1979. I’ll never know whether he was telling me the truth, but he told me he tried to get permission to add me to the roster and was denied because he wasn’t allowed to bypass the boys who were older than me. Graham told me he protested. The three players (none of whom were goalies) he called up from the team a year older than mine were James Patrick, a defenseman who went on to star in the NHL; Dave Farnfield, who ended up playing at Yale; and Rob Scheuer, who ended up captaining the Princeton hockey team.

      While the first of those names is what hockey people will focus on, it is the second and third names that were relevant to me, as they were recruited by and eventually accepted at Ivy League schools. To me that indicated that Graham was able to deliver on his promises. The reality, of course, is that Graham had nothing to do with their being recruited by Ivy League schools. But I didn’t know that back then.

      GRAHAM HAD GOTTEN to know me very well. He understood what I wanted to achieve and had positioned himself as ideally suited to help me achieve my dreams. He saw that I was particularly vulnerable because I was a bit of a loner caught between two worlds. I looked to Graham and not to my dad—a man who, I am sure, loved me but just couldn’t show it—for guidance. I opened up to Graham. I let him in.

      A goaltender has an interesting perspective on the game of hockey. In many ways the game unfolds in front of the goalie, its patterns revealing themselves sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but usually in recognizable ways. An adept goalie adapts and reacts to the moving parts, most often without even consciously thinking about what is happening. The goalie is said to be “in the zone,” and the pucks are stopped, controlled, and redirected with ease.

      I thought I was on my game.