The Late Bloomer by Ken Baker Page B

Olympics. . . . At the age of 12, he played on the 13–14 year-old team. At 5-0 and 135–140 pounds, he was a large goalie.
    During his first game for the traveling team, Baker remembers playing his present coach Kris Hicks’ team. Baker’s team lost 8-2 but it was during that game he realized he wanted to play for Hicks.
    â€œI got a call from this guy wanting to know if I had open tryouts,” Hicks said, referring to Baker’s father, Larry. “When he came to tryouts I saw this little fat kid come out on the ice. I had two goalies from the year before trying out. But Baker was the best kidon the ice. He had the best reflexes of all the goalies. He didn’t know anything about playing goalie, but he had the best reflexes.”
    As a member of the Niagara Scenic Junior A Hockey Club based in West Seneca, Baker will have the opportunity to travel to Chicago, Detroit and Canada to play other athletes of his caliber.
    Baker’s immediate goal is to play for a Division I college. After that, he has thought about both the Olympics and the National Hockey League. Under NCAA rules, five Division I schools can transport Baker to their campus to encourage him to attend that school and receive an athletic scholarship.
    All college correspondences Baker has received are alphabetized and put in a black box. If the correspondence is too large for the black box it is placed in a cardboard box. Baker, who will be a senior at Frontier High School, has been contacted by about 30 of the 41 Division I schools. The schools include Wisconsin, Brown University and Notre Dame.
    Baker appears to have the world at his hands. However, he does not see himself as a great hockey player but instead looks at what he needs to do to improve. Next year, when the college decision is made and the NHL draft rolls around, Baker may obtain his goals.
    â€œWhen he was eight, Kenny asked me how to become famous,” Larry said. “I told him to take something he was good at and become the best at it. He had just started playing hockey and said, ‘Well, I’m going to become a famous hockey player.’”
    Reading this story now, some thirteen years later, I notice the omissions more than the accolades. The article doesn’t mention that I have virtually no social life outside of hockey, that I have never attended a school dance and that I spend a fair amount of my free time doing hundreds of sit-ups in my bedroom, poking at my flabby stomach with disgust afterward. The reporter mentions that I don’t consider myself a great hockey player, but she doesn’t know—because I don’t tell her—that I have such a low regard for my talents because I am ateenage perfectionist who mentally abuses himself
(You suck! . . . Piece of shit! . . . You could have stopped that shot. Get your ass in gear!)
for several days after letting in a bad goal or making a knucklehead play.
    She doesn’t know that when I was eleven, I decided one day that what I really wanted to do was be a professional figure skater. My mother had taken me to see an ice show, one of those Christmastime ice ballets in which spotlights illuminate princes lifting princesses above a dreamy mist of dry ice. I was mesmerized by the grace and beauty of the figure skaters. Afterward I told my mother how much more graceful these skaters were than hockey players. She suggested I sign up for figure skating. “I bet it will make you a better hockey player,” she encouraged.
    Back home, Mom told Dad that I wanted a pair of figure skates and might start taking lessons. Dad wasn’t so keen on the idea of seeing one of his sons carving figure eights into the ice. He probably could taste the bile at the mere thought of his son wearing a pair of spandex pants, a silk blouse and rouge smeared on his cheeks. Dad came up to my room and poked his head through the crack in the door. “Figure skating is for