I keep telling myself that. Everyone who asks which branch of the Church of Hockey I belong to, I've started to tell them I'm agnostic. That I was raised one way, but I've come to a spiritual awakening or something like that. Or that I'm a New Haven Nighthawks fan, which confuses some and makes others laugh.
Hey, I won't dispute that I have a team that I follow a little closer than the other teams that I don't have to cover. I can't dispute that I know that one team a lot better than I know the others. Old habits die hard. But when it comes to out-and-out rooting, I can't do it anymore. It has nothing to do with impatience, lack of motivation, really bad drafts, poor trades, lack of organizational depth.
It's all about some semblance of professionalism. If I'm gonna be covering professional hockey, I figure, I can't very well be rooting for someone. I know I can be impartial while cheering one way in my own room, but others don't know I can, so I'm not a fan of anyone's.
At least, that's what I like to say.
In practice, it's far different. And it got even stranger June 24.
Seven years earlier to the very day, my friend Johnny and I sat at the Hartford Civic Center, watching the NHL Draft while still coming down from the high of our lives. Just 10 days before the draft, the Rangers had won their first Stanley Cup since (chant it) 1940. The franchise's ruination in four short years seemed impossible. The nucleus would return. Players like Alexei Kovalev and Mike Richter and Brian Leetch were still young enough, and Mark Messier wasn't that old. Another Cup or two seemed possible. We were confident. We believed, like we did when we were little kids, when we knew every year, even when the Rangers snuck into the playoffs in fourth in the Patrick Division, that THIS was the year, finally.
For me, a big reason for believing was the guy who wore No. 9 for most of the 1990s (though he wore 11 once). Adam Graves arrived from Edmonton and ingratiated himself immediately. He grinded. He worked. He scored. He was the consummate teammate. And then we found out what he did with his spare time -- help everyone he could help and be everywhere he could in the community.
People would ask me who my favorite hockey player was, and I didn't want to say Adam Graves. It was almost like it would be an insult. Graves was more than a favorite hockey player. In that weird way sports figures take on roles in our lives, Graves became the older brother I never had, the role model and hero, the one whose life I respected amid the guys whose games I respected. Yeah, I loved his game, I emulated his game when I played on the wing as much as I could, but there was so much more there. Call him a favorite player? It's like retiring Jackie Robinson's number league-wide. It's nice, but it's not right, because it's not enough.
A couple of years ago, I sent off a long, unwieldy essay to a couple of friends, in which I set about establishing which Ranger was my favorite among those who weren't named Adam Graves, who had to be taken as a given. (It was to replace the traded Alexei Kovalev, incidentally, and the name that came out of the hopper was Manny Malhotra's.) One of those friends, fellow hockey writer Carole Sussman, wrote back, saying that I had somehow evoked The Velveteen Rabbit in my description of Graves, a description that went on and on (familiar?) about his constancy, his just BEING there, always in this exalted spot no matter what went on around him.
Funny, I'm not sure I entirely bought it then. But now that Adam Graves is a Shark, something damn weird has happened to me.
You ever find your old teddy bear? I do, every so often, when I'm breaking down piles of accumulated things in my room. Out pops good ol' Pooh-Bear, bedraggled, floppy, nose missing, mouth torn, stitched up in a couple of places. In that instant, and just for that fleeting instant, I'm two or three again, carefree, a little kid in the Bronx, with his grandparents next door and his little brother in the crib in the next room and the subway up the block rumbling up to Dyre Avenue, and the most important thing in the world is getting downstairs in time for Sesame Street.
When I find that little teddy bear, there's that little corner of my mind that wishes I was still two or three, and that little nostalgic corner resents the hell out of the rest of myself for growing up. It knows I don't need a teddy bear anymore, but it's always there, impossible to ignore, an ingrained part of whatever I've become.
Toward the end of June, I found a mid-'90s Adam Graves hockey card. Early in July, I read a note on the San Jose Sharks' Web site about Graves and his arrival in the Bay Area to go house-hunting. And in a weird way, both instances were like bumping into my teddy bear.
Each time, in that instant, I was 16 again, watching him arrive in New York in that President's Trophy year. I was 19 again, watching him score 52 goals and (regardless of what the official scoresheet said) score the Cup-winning goal. I was 22, watching the wrap- around beat Brodeur in 1997.
I used to joke that my childhood ended with the end of the Rangers' 1997 playoff run, a couple of days after I graduated from college. Cutting the tie for good, watching Adam Graves go, for both his own good and for the good of the New York Rangers organization, has to be a good thing, right?
After all, I'm not a Ranger fan anymore. I'm all grown up.
I think.
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Michael Fornabaio--mmef17@yahoo.com