The Late Bloomer by Ken Baker Page A

the time I left for the Olympic Training Center on July 6, under the reasonable logic that they aren’t going to pick a fat goalie for the Olympic team.
    Two days before the tryout camp I step on my mother’s scale in the bathroom. With all the nervousness of a roulette spinner, I cringe as the dial stops at the 181-pound mark.
What? I’ve hardly eaten for weeks. That’s brutal!
    When my plane lands in Colorado Springs a couple of days later, I’m light-headed from starvation. In the last forty-eight hours I’ve ingested two cans of OJ, three pieces of toast (no butter), several glasses of water, one bite of American Airlines quiche surprise and a Coke.Jenny gave me an apple at the Buffalo airport, but I didn’t even eat that.
    Standing amid a pale sea of shirtless hockey prospects in their boxers and briefs, I gaze jealously at chiseled pecs that slapshots have shaped into rock-solid breastplates. Muscular thighs sturdy as tree stumps. Washboard abs. Adonis shoulders forming the wide top of V-shaped upper bodies tapering down to narrow waists. And there I stand, self-conscious, my boobies almost as big as my girlfriend’s and that . . . that fucking
belly
hanging over the waist of my shorts like a fleshy Quebec tourist’s on a Florida beach.
    I contract my stomach muscles and suck in the gut, practically turning blue from holding my breath. I’m waiting for my turn to step on the scale, but about thirty guys are ahead of me. Most of them want to weigh as much as possible, to look big, strong and tough on the stat sheet, which is pored over by pro scouts. So many of the players were eating plateloads of bread and spaghetti and fatty desserts at lunch. A few guys had even planned on wearing ankle weights, an idea that they had to abort when the coaches made us take off our clothes.
    My pal Jeff, a goalie from Minnesota, is standing in front of me. When he turns around, I cross my arms in front of my body. He stares me up, then down.
    â€œHey, Bakes,” he says, “you on the doughnut diet or something?”
    I tip the scale at 179 pounds.
    Off the ice, being timed in the forty-yard dash and the push-up competitions, I feel sluggish and fat. But on the ice, my body hidden under thirty pounds of leather leg pads, a chest protector, arm pads and a goalie mask, I am lightning fast, letting in fewer goals than any other goalie. I make the cut. The last day of camp, the coaches call me into a training room. If I had any fingernails left, I would be chewing them. They hand me a Team U.S.A. folder and tell me congratulations. I am a member of the sixteen-year-old United States national hockey team.
    â€”
    My goaltending achievements—rather than my feats of denial—earn me my first press, a feature story in an August 1987 newspaper article that runs just before the start of my senior year of high school.
    The Bee
prints with the story a photo of me posing in my pads and gloves with my official red, white and blue Team U.S.A. hockey jersey and a headline declaring, “Stopping the shot everyday occurrence for local youth.” It praises me as a local boy poised to move on to bigger and better things. It certainly isn’t Pulitzer material, but the reporter does a pretty good job at summing up my hockey career:
    Division I hockey, the Olympics and the National Hockey League are all in the realm of possibilities for one local youth.
    Kenneth Baker recently came back from the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado where he participated in the Select-17 camp, comprised of the best 17-year-old hockey players in the country. Of eight goalies at the camp, Baker was rated third and was told the competition was so close he could have easily been chosen as the top goalie in the country.
    At the age of 16, Baker attended the Select-16 camp in which he played against Quebec. It was the first United States gold medal hockey win since the 1980