Page 10 of The Grumpy Defenseman
Bella: I’ll think of something. Go be brilliant.
I pocketed my phone and looked out the window as the city scrolled past: taquerias, a church with a sign that read GOD LOVES YOU BUT I’M HIS FAVORITE. San Antonio had a sense of humor about itself that I appreciated. No pretense. Just a city being exactly what it was.
The community center was the kind of city-funded building that had survived four decades of budget meetings by refusing to age gracefully: bleach-smelling tile, scuffed baseboards, a ceiling fan that clicked on every rotation. Somebody hadhung paper streamers in Stampede green from every available hook, and the effect was exactly the kind of earnest that ownership paid photographers to capture. It was already buzzing when we arrived.
Posters lined the walls. Kids in oversized jerseys vibrated with the frequency of children who were about to meet their heroes and might actually explode from the anticipation.
I moved through the crowd, camera up, finding the rhythm of the room. Brick was immediately swarmed, three kids hanging off his arms while he pretended to struggle. I got six frames of it, each one better than the last. Across the room, Mack had stationed himself behind a folding table and was working through a long autograph line with the patience of a man who had done this more summers than he would admit. He signed jerseys, programs, and at one point a small child’s cast with the same steady handwriting he used on everything. Two rookies were teaching a group of girls howto tape a stick, which was going badly and hilariously. I shot that too.
Community days always did this to teams. The extroverts got mobbed first. Staff hovered at the edges, pretending any of it was spontaneous while quietly steering the order of things. Somewhere in every room, one player became the unofficial translator between the public and the men who would rather block a slapshot than make small talk. On this team, that player was obviously Brick.
And then I saw Evan.
He had positioned himself near the back wall, of course he had, with the same exit-adjacent posture I had come to recognize as his default setting. Arms crossed. The human equivalent of a CLOSED sign.
But a boy had broken through.
He was maybe eight. Big eyes. Bigger jersey, a McKinney 44 that hung past his knees like a dress. His father hovered a few feet behind, wearing the nervous expression of a parent who had watchedhis kid walk up to a stranger and was now holding his breath.
“Mr. McKinney?” The boy’s voice was small but steady. “Can you show me how to shoot like you?”
Evan’s whole body went still.
Not the guarded stillness I had seen before. Something different. A calculation happening behind his eyes that had nothing to do with exits or threats. He was deciding something: not whether to engage, but how.
“Where’s your stick?” he asked.
The boy held up a youth stick so beat-up it looked like it had been through a war. Blade chipped, tape frayed, the kind of equipment that said this kid played every day on whatever surface was available.
Evan took it. Weighed it like a craftsman inspecting a tool. Then he grabbed an adult stick leaning against the wall and crouched down to the boy’s level.
“Watch,” he said.
No smile. No warmth for the cameras. Just measured instruction, the sameprecision I had seen on the ice, scaled down and softened for a child who was looking at him like he had hung the moon.
He positioned the boy’s hands. Nudged his feet into alignment with a tap of the stick blade, patient and exact.
“Relax your shoulders,” he said. “Don’t muscle it. Let the stick do the work.”
The boy swung. Missed the target.
“Again,” Evan said.
The boy swung again. Connected. The ball rolled to the wall.
His father’s breath caught audibly.
Evan did not react. No high-five. No celebration for the cameras he had to know were watching. He just nodded once, the same nod he gave when a drill went clean, and said, “Again.”
The boy hit three more in a row.
Then Evan did something I did not expect.
He took the adult stick, pulled a marker from his pocket, and wrote something along the blade. His hand movedquickly. Not a signature. Something longer. When he finished, he held the stick out to the boy.
The father stepped forward. “We can’t…”
“It’s his,” Evan said. Quiet. Final.
