Seven Parts of a Ball Team and Other Sports Stories by Scott Young

Author:Scott Young [Young, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443434164
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Vacancy in Goal

When the Volant forward swept around the Wasp defense and feinted a shot, the goalkeeper moved with the feint and was at the mercy of the real shot an instant later. In the rail seats near center ice of the huge hockey arena George Rockaway shrank into himself as if with physical pain. The fifteen thousand city dwellers in the rink with him booed and groaned and jeered at the ease of the goal, the eighth scored against the Wasps in this game, but Rockaway sat in silence and stared at the goalkeeper with a feeling close to hatred, which he was powerless to prevent or relieve.

Many of the customers were leaving; their comments were bitter and ill-tempered for the pasting the Wasps were taking, but Rockaway was intent as the teams lined up to resume play after the goal. While the referee held the puck ready to drop, Rockaway’s right arm twitched nervously, an unspoken order for one of the Wasp defensemen to move a few feet to his left. Rockaway’s face was on the cover of the official program for this game. The picture showed him in his uniform as the Wasps’ goalkeeper, which he had been six days ago. Now, of course, his appearance was different: there was a covering on his right eye—three strips of flesh-colored tape tight against a pad of cotton. With the other eye he followed the play below. His shoulders jerked in sympathy when a man who had been his friend for years body-checked a flying forward.

Because of his missing eye he had to turn his head to follow the return rush. The puck was passed from friend to friend and his lips moved with encouragement and exhortation and warning as he watched them.

The klaxon sounded to end the game. The Wasps had played as well as they ever had this season and for two months they had led the league; but this game they had lost 8–3 and tomorrow morning the third goalkeeper who had tried to take Rockaway’s place would be back on the train for the minors. The scrapers and flooders took over on the ice. Rockaway, who had allowed an average of only two goals a game for the first forty-eight games of the season, walked through the crowd toward the dressing-room passage. From the litter of discarded programs his own face mocked him, his face with two eyes.

A rink policeman said, “Hi, Rocky,” when he passed under the sign saying this passage was for players only. Arnold Forster, managing director of the Wasps, was standing by the dressing-room door. Forster had scouted Rocky as a junior thirteen years ago, had signed him to his first professional contract three years later, had become his friend in the years between then and now, and had spent these last few days frantically searching for a suitable replacement.

One after another he had tested goalies from his farm system in the big league team’s goal. None had been adequate. Rocky

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