The Code by Gare Joyce

find out later that he’d written the speech on his own. He put in the best shift of all those who took centre stage.
    â€œWhen I came here Coach told me that he was concerned about me as a person first and a player second and said he took that approach with every player. He told me, ‘You’re going to play a few years but your life off the ice lasts a heckuva …’”
    Clearly, the kid was cleaning it up for the family audience. Bones had put the Ol’ Redhead on a sodium-free diet but the coach’s language was as salty as the Dead Sea.
    â€œâ€˜â€¦ lot longer than your career on it.’ He said, ‘If you look after your life, if you’ve got character, if you’ve got heart, it won’t necessarily make you a great player, but it will make you as good a player as you have the ability to be.’”
    Pass the Kleenex. Hunts wanted to know about what any GM would have: this kid’s character and heart. If I had to file my final report on Mays after he stood up there in the arena that day, Hunts would have thought I’d gone soft. The kid you want your daughter to bring home. Probably leaving the arena to give blood and then put in a volunteer shift at the Peterborough soup kitchen.

15
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    Mays was out with mono back in the fall and missed the first twelve games. When he came back, though, he tore up the league, a point-and-half a game, until he tore his shoulder on a blindside hit. I was a bit troubled by the kid’s shoulder but that’s barely in my job description.
    In late May we bring in the meat for inspection. We fly in all our main players of interest, the kids we’re looking at in round one of the draft. We pick them up at LAX and they think they’re in for a vacation in the sun. It’s a bit of a disappointment to them that we put them through off-ice workouts that must seem to them like variations of challenges on Survivor . They’re really disappointed when they get leaned into by our team doctor and a sports psychologist in L.A. The former focuses on reported injuries, the latter on unreported psychic wounds. The former only makes sense, but the latter I don’t have any time for at all, and neither really does Hunts. The psych’s on staff mostly to appease the guy who signs our cheques.
    Yeah, our Gyro Gearloose of Beverly Hills never shuts upabout studying psychology in college—to hear him talk you would have thought that Adler had been his thesis adviser. Given that he blows everything up to 400 percent, it’s almost certain that his entire background in the field consisted of a one-semester half-credit course with a final made up of trueand-false and multiple-choice questions and sessions with his shrink after each of his failed marriages.
    My antennae twitch whenever a kid suffers an injury in junior—pros are bound to get in some train wrecks and, with me as one of the exceptions, most come back from them at no worse than 90 percent. With a kid, though, “once injured” has a way of becoming “always injured.” Doctors will tell you that it’s a kid getting all screwed up—his growth plates and all—before the body is fully formed.
    Some scouts go for the high mystical stuff and think the “always injured” is a kid with a black cloud over his head. I wouldn’t discount it. I try to look at it organically: If a kid is getting injured all the time, he’s doing something wrong on the ice. He’s putting himself in bad places on the ice, taking bad risks, not reading the play. He left himself vulnerable the first time and repeats his mistake. And that adds up to bad hockey sense. The casual fan thinks making a great play is hockey sense, but to me that’s just vision. Staying alive and being able to show up for work: That’s hockey sense to me. You make a great pass that no one anticipates: vision. You play a thousand games in the league: hockey