That s Hockey

The Gear Bag
Practice was over.
Pucks still clattered and boomed through the arena, but the gates in the boards had already swung open and the ice resurfacer was easing out onto the rink. The coaches and most of the team drifted toward the locker room. A few players kept circling, squeezing in a little extra work. The younger guys gathered up the pucks. It was an ordinary practice day.
Selya came off the ice with the rest of the team in a splendid mood. Before games, the coaches usually eased up on the players, and the team, like Irish setters before a hunt, full of eagerness, excitement, and readiness, had moved through every drill gladly. No strain. No grinding. Just light, playful work with a spark in it.
"Alexander, is it true you're leaving the sport?" a young man with a recorder appeared as if from nowhere.
Selya ignored the reporter and kept moving over the rubber mats, swaying slightly on his skates.
"Alexander, we've also heard that you may go to Europe to finish your playing career. Will it be Switzerland? Sweden? Maybe Finland?"
Selya gave a small smile and ignored that question too.
"They also say that after you retire, the club wants you to stay on as a coach. How would you comment on that? Is it true?"
"Young man, everything you just said is true," Selya said with a smile.
"There are rumors you had a conflict with the coaches. How will you work with them, then?"
"Young man, you heard what I said. Everything is true. It will be tricky, of course, playing in three championships and coaching here at the same time, but I will do my best. All the best." Selya winked and disappeared into the locker room.
"But still..." the young man shouted after him, but the door was already closing and no answer followed. "Same as always," he muttered in defeat, turning off the recorder. "You can never get a straight word out of Selivanov. Jokes, wisecracks, and not a shred of specifics. But not all of it can be rumor. There is no smoke without fire, is there?"
The truth was this: Alexander Selivanov, known to everyone as Selya, had decided to quit hockey.
First came age. He had just turned thirty-five, and behind him were nineteen full professional seasons. For an ordinary man, thirty-five is the heart of his prime, a wonderful, creative age, when there is still plenty of strength, ambition, and appetite for a fight, but there is also experience and enough common sense not to throw himself headfirst into every tempting depth. Thirty-five is an excellent age for major victories and serious achievements. For athletes, thirty-five is ancient history.
A sporting life is brief. Only the rare long-lived players in hockey reach that line while still performing at a respectable level. Most players, quite sensibly, are done by thirty. What is the point of being a millionaire if you cannot use the money you earned with sweat and blood? At thirty, you can still save what is left of your health and live like a normal human being for a while, provided you do not start sniffing powder, dumping stacks of cash at blackjack tables, or buying yachts and houses in Monaco. Those who keep playing after thirty usually just play out the end of their careers in backwater clubs, beer leagues, and forgotten corners of the hockey world, little more than shadows of their former greatness. Only a few, right up to the final horn, still look like seasoned gladiators, no worse than they were in their youth.
Selya was one of those few, the grit and pride of Russian hockey.
Sasha Selivanov had made it to the senior game very early. Precocious and gifted, he played only with older age groups even as a kid. By fifteen, he had played for every national team available to him. At sixteen, probably the hardest year of his career, he played for his own age group, for the older youth team, for the reserve team, which people would later start calling a farm club, sometimes for the senior team, and also for the country's junior and youth national teams, back when the country was still the USSR.
That season made his head spin. Everybody wanted him somewhere. He played a lot, scored a lot, traveled constantly, and all but forgot school existed. Selya tried taking textbooks with him on trips, but mostly to settle his nerves and quiet his conscience. It is impossible to play professional hockey and do anything else. Ten months a year, you only eat, sleep, practice, and play. And in between, you are always going somewhere or flying somewhere.
But none of it bothered him. In that memorable season, when he first made the senior team as a kid, Selya understood once and for all that hockey would be his profession, his passion, and his life. At sixteen, of course, he did not imagine that he would last so long in the sport. Every season cost him salt sweat, and sometimes salt blood, in the most literal way.
Still, no matter how tired of hockey he became at the end of a championship, no matter how badly injuries irritated and tormented him, after a couple of months of summer rest he would begin waiting impatiently for training camp. He missed the brutal workouts, the exhibition games, the practical jokes, some clever and some not, and the locker-room jokes and roguish locker-room bravado. For nineteen years he worked from whistle to whistle through dizzying preseasons, through workloads beyond human limits, through training camps, endless long stretches locked away at team bases, constant travel, games, tournaments, practices, morning skates, and warmups. Sometimes he woke up on an airplane and could not remember where he was flying from, or more importantly, where he was flying to.
Alarmed, he would look around and calm down only when his eyes found the familiar faces of teammates or coaches.
"Right, from Ufa to Kazan," he would remember, and fall asleep again.
Even the brain starts to misfire from constant overwork and constant jolts to the nerves, because in a single game players and coaches can die and come back to life several times. Any game can turn in either direction. It is wonderful when a team drags a hopeless game back from the dead. Everyone is happy, the locker room is filled with triumph and celebration, and such games charge a team with energy and bind it together. But sometimes a team gives away a game it had all but won. Not on purpose, of course. The threads simply knot together: you take a confident lead, score two or three goals, relax, and the opponent, driven by desperation, gets angry and gathers itself for one last push. It is a disaster when those comebacks happen in finals or decisive games. Scars on the soul and on the heart, gray at the temples, and the bitterness of memory stay with you for life.
The same platforms, the same airports, the same hotels. Half your life on the road, in buses, trains, and planes. For ten months of the year, apart from hotel rooms, locker rooms, and sports arenas, you see nothing. You can live like a normal person for only two months, May and June, and in those sixty days you have to fit in everything normal people do over an entire year.
It was especially difficult when Selya was studying at the Institute of Physical Education. He remembered the vacation after his first year and first full season with the senior team as a nightmare. His home club, naturally, had helped him get into the institute. He did not take entrance exams. He showed up on September first for the sake of appearances and vanished for a year.
At the end of April, after practice, the team manager called him in.
"Selya," he began calmly. "Your dean called me and said that if you do not pass the exams and credits for both the winter and summer sessions by the end of June, you will be expelled."
He had to pass eight exams and more than twenty credits.
At first Selya thought Lavrentich was joking. He had not thought about the institute once all season. He assumed the club would take care of the matter by itself. But when he asked the other young players in the locker room how they handled their sessions, it turned out they actually passed them. So Selya spent two months buried in books, not only at home but also in the library. He went from department to department, hunting for professors, took exams, failed them, came back, and retook them. And that was only part of the nightmare.
His vacation reached its full glory when he decided to get his driver's license, and his father, delighted that his son was finally home and there was finally help in the house, began repairs at home and construction of a bathhouse at the dacha. Exams, driving school, the driving test at the traffic police, a Stakhanovite pace of repairs and construction. His father understood that Selya would soon fly off again, so they worked from dawn until dark. On top of that, he had to catch up on everything he had missed during the season with friends and girlfriends: a carnival at the club at night, dancing, fun, girls, and in the morning, log walls, whitewash, or paint. Then at night it all began again.
In short, Selya could not wait for practices to begin so everyone would leave him alone. He thought he would never have a vacation like that again. He did not, but there were others, each with its own errands, worries, and running around. Everything had to be done, and somehow he also had to rest, go to the sea, warm his muscles in the sun, stretch out on the beach, eat and sleep as much as he wanted. In other words, the body had to be given a chance to recover, rest, and gather strength, because another season awaited him, with inhuman loads, extreme training, stress, nerves, and a whole list of unpleasant things that nobody in professional sport has ever managed to escape.
Injuries belonged to that list of unpleasant things, and they were the second reason Selya decided to quit. Over the long years in hockey, too many had piled up. Every profession has its occupational diseases. Librarians develop dust allergies. Teachers, because an entire class has to hear them and they constantly raise their voices, begin having problems with their vocal cords. People of science ruin their eyesight from working with large amounts of text. Hockey players blow out menisci and knee ligaments, collect fractures and concussions, spinal and groin hernias, chronic exhaustion, and Selya had all of it. He had four concussions alone.
The old fractures, sprains, concussions, and hernias did not bother him much, but he began to fear new ones. It is one thing when you are seventeen and everything heals as if you were a stray dog that could survive anything. It is another thing when you are over thirty. Recovery takes longer, everything knits back together more slowly and with more difficulty, and most importantly, with age your sense of danger sharpens. It is not even physical. Emotionally, injuries become far harder to endure.
At thirty, after another fracture, Selya realized that professional sport is the trade of health. One way or another, every player trades his health. Someone is talented and can sell it for a high price, because no hockey player has yet managed to escape fractures, concussions, and hernias. Someone else is forced to trade his health for pennies. God did not give him talent, and besides hockey he cannot do anything else, and of course he does not want to. Who would trade hockey for something else? So he suffers, shortening his days, playing like a circus elephant for peanuts on the outskirts and scrapyards of the hockey world.
The idea that sports are good for your health is a myth. Sport is harmful. Exercise is good: easy aerobic runs in the park on weekend mornings, skiing with the family, going to the pool, soccer in the yard, basketball with friends. That is good for you. But professional athletes are gladiators, pure and simple. That is why professionals are paid enormous money. That money is drenched in their own sweat and sometimes in someone else's blood, day after day.
There was a third reason why Selya decided to finish. He could easily have played another couple of seasons. He still had enough fire and strength. He could have forced himself to tolerate practices, heavy loads, and constant travel. The injuries did not trouble him that much either. He had suffered so many in his sports life that one more, one less, made little difference. Fractures, strains, tears, dislocations, recovery, rehabilitation, getting back into shape, all of that was part of the job. You could say he was used to injuries. He would not have been glad to get new ones, but he would not have dramatized them either.
There is no hockey without pain. The great Tarasov once said that if a hockey player has no lump and no bruise after a game, then he is a coward, not a hockey player. Selya was far from a coward. The matter was not fractures.
It was family.
His wife was tired of living out of suitcases. Every two or three years her husband changed clubs, and that meant another new city, another unfamiliar apartment, no relatives, no friends. The children were growing up, too. They needed a normal school, their own house, a real home, permanent friends in the yard, classmates, grandmothers and grandfathers nearby. And all of that existed. Hockey had allowed Selya to earn a living. In the city where he had been born, where he first stepped onto the ice, and where he met his wife, he had built a luxurious house, moved his parents and his wife's parents there, planted a garden, and brought in cats and dogs. But he could live with his wife and children in his own house for a month a year at best.
In his hometown he had only begun playing hockey. He became the Alexander Selivanov known across the country in the national team and in other clubs. Strong teams that fought for championship medals were maintained by owners of oil fields and steel mills. Hockey was the favorite toy of oligarchs and very ambitious governors, who personally invited stars and created every possible condition for them. So Selya rolled from one oil man to the next, and his whole family wandered with him.
"Do you know the difference between boys and men?" Selya once asked his wife jokingly.
"What?"
"Men have more expensive toys."
Selya was an expensive toy.
He had already earned more than enough to live on, and that was another reason he decided this season would not be his penultimate one, but his final one. Hockey players, like special-forces soldiers, never say "last": last game, last practice, last trip. They always say "the latest" or "the most recent." Why tempt fate? You say, "I scored two in my last game," and in the very next practice you injure your back, or your neck, or your knee, and never step on the ice again. Then it really turns out that you scored two in your last game, even though you might have played and played. Although who knows?
Naturally, as a true athlete and therefore a superstitious man, Selya told no one and would not have uttered the phrase "final season" even in an empty room. Still, it became harder and harder for him to force himself to fight until he bled on the ice, run cross-country, and move barbells. He was rich and could have lived a different life long ago, without road trips, practices, bumps, and bruises. He could have lived in his own house with his family, gone into some business out of boredom, raised his children, traveled. But he believed he would still have time for all that. There would be a whole life after sport. Playing hockey, however, would soon be impossible.
The young ones were pressing from behind. Every year he had less strength and desire to play, and every year recovery required more time. In the old days, he could tear it up all night in a nightclub on the eve of a game, sleep a couple of hours, show up for the morning skate as if nothing had happened, and then play brilliantly that evening. Now, even while following the athletic regimen from first rule to last, the sleep and days off the coaches gave between games and practices were not enough. Full recovery required much more time, and nobody could give it to him. You cannot fight nature, or more precisely, physiology.
Constant incomplete recovery led to chronic fatigue and, as a consequence, irritability. Everything irritated and infuriated Selya: the endless chicken on game days; teammates, the the same faces he was forced to be around twenty-four hours a day, for years, day after day; smoky hotel rooms; young players fighting for roster spots and leaning into him too hard in practice; inaccurate passes that missed the blade, and so on and so on and so on.
At some point he understood that he could no longer break himself, and more importantly, he no longer wanted to. The final straw was the morning practice on December thirty-first. On January second the team was flying out for games, so before the holidays the coaches announced that there would be practice in the morning on December thirty-first, and on January first as well.
"So think carefully," the head coach added, "when you are sitting at the holiday table..." He paused and let his eyes travel meaningfully around the locker room. "Think about what you can allow yourselves, and how much of it."
"We'll figure it out," Selya said irritably, barely holding back profanity. "Why practice on New Year's Eve? I understand January first, before the road trip, no questions there. But wouldn't it be better if we got some sleep at home and spent the whole day before New Year with our families?"
"Selivanov," the head coach shut him down, "when you become a coach, then you can decide what is better. We meet on December thirty-first."
Selya understood perfectly well that, despite his name and achievements, the coaches would not forgive that outburst. So he went into the coaches' room himself, apologized, and said that this season would be his last. He would finish it and go home. As preventive medicine, they lectured him a little, saying he was a veteran and had to think about what could be said where, and what could never be said anywhere. Selya apologized again, returned to the locker room, and told the team about the conversation with the coaches.
They gave Selya a magnificent sendoff. The last game of the season was at home. Everyone knew Selya was leaving, so the team won, and his linemates played all three periods almost exclusively for him. Under the roar of the fans, Alexander Selivanov put two pucks into the visitors' net. After the final horn and the handshake line, they lifted Selya onto their shoulders, carried him ceremonially around the ice for a lap of honor under the applause of packed stands, and then carried him into the locker room.
Then came the banquet, the bustle, the packing, and three days later Alexander Selivanov woke up in his own house, in his own bedroom, in a wonderful mood. There was nowhere to hurry. No need to hurry to practice, no weights, no cross-country runs, no whistles, no regimen, no minute-by-minute schedule.
Selya squeezed his eyes shut in horror.
Only now did he understand that for nineteen years, for most of his life, he had lived by a schedule and could never be late. Hockey customs are harsh. If you are late, the fine is one hundred dollars. If you are late on game day, five hundred. If it is a playoff game, one thousand. And that is despite the fact that hockey players have an extremely packed schedule and the odds of being late somewhere are astronomically high.
Selya grimaced and remembered an ordinary weekday when the team lived, or, more accurately, was locked up at the base.
Wake-up, 7:30.
Out for morning exercise, 8:00.
Breakfast, 8:30.
Departure for practice, 9:00.
Off-ice warmup in the gym, 9:30.
On the ice, 10:00.
End of on-ice practice, 11:15.
Weight-room training begins, 11:30.
End of weights, 12:30.
Cool-down run, 12:40.
Departure for lunch at the base, 13:15.
Lunch, 13:30.
Recovery nap, 14:00 to 15:30.
Afternoon snack, 15:45.
Departure for evening practice, 16:00.
Off-ice warmup, 16:30.
On the ice, 17:00.
End of on-ice practice, 18:15.
Strength training in the gym, or basketball, handball, floorball in the indoor court, or some other some other movement work off the ice, 18:30.
Departure for dinner at the base, 19:30.
Dinner, 20:00.
Before lights-out there might also be a meeting, a video session on the big screen, studying the opponent's games, a theory or tactics lesson on how the opponent plays on the power play, actively or passively on the penalty kill, how it starts an attack, how it breaks out of the zone. Only after all that do you begin to belong to yourself. But even when personal time has begun, the thought that God forbid you might be late for something still sits inside you, and you remain collected and focused.
Habit. Or more precisely, professional conditioning. Day after day you live by a schedule, for weeks, months, years. Every day there are twenty or twenty-five items planned down to the minute, and it does not matter whether it is summer camp, home games when the team lives at the base, or road games when the base is replaced by a hotel. More than twenty points remain unchanged, with the only difference being that morning practices on game day turn into morning skates, and evening practices become the games themselves, the reason teams maintain such harsh discipline. Everyone works for points and victories, without complaint and without distraction.
Selya had observed the schedule from his earliest days in the game, but in any team there are guys who, despite the strict rules of the rules and the serious fines, still manage to be late somewhere every day, some of them several times a day. They are the unofficial sponsors of the New Year's banquets, or the banquets at season's end. The fine system maintains not only discipline in the team, but also a healthy atmosphere, which is no less important, especially when the championship is coming to an end and everyone is tired not only of the physical workload, but of one another.
Fines are wonderful because the coaches do not have to scold the chronic latecomers, educate them, appeal to their conscience, say that a grown man, after so many years in hockey, already a champion, with medals and achievements, is still late like a boy, and everyone is always waiting for him, and he is making the coaches and the team nervous, and how long can this go on, maybe it is time to say goodbye. Or worse, when the language becomes stronger and the phrasing harsher, insults and real resentments begin, the team starts defending the player, the coaches tighten the screws in retaliation so nobody gets any ideas about rebellion, and the complex mechanism that was adjusted with such difficulty falls apart into separate gears and springs.
When there are fines, nobody has to lecture anyone. Nobody has to ruin relationships. Instead, the amount is simply announced with a smile, and the guilty player, without excuses, explanations, or proof, without blushing, calmly goes and counts out the money to the treasurer.
The treasurer is usually the team manager. He accepts the money, writes everything down, and keeps the kitty. At the end of the season, so nobody suspects the money has been pocketed, a banquet is thrown, and while everyone is still sober, the treasurer, under a storm of jokes, whistles, and applause, announces the team's chief sponsor.
That is why in good teams, where the spirit is strong and healthy, when someone is late or breaks a rule, a wave of approval and words of gratitude roll through the locker room, gym, rink, restaurant, or bus, depending on where the player was late. Naturally, it is all done as a joke, and in this way the most important thing is achieved: iron discipline and a friendly atmosphere. Nobody brands a black sheep. Everything turns into humor, jokes, and a cocky, fighting mood. The paradox is that fines do not create resentment and do not divide a team. On the contrary, they turn it into a single fist capable of smashing and punching through any obstacle.
In his entire sports life, Selya was late only once. When he entered the locker room to an approving rumble, he walked demonstratively over to the team manager, counted out twice the required sum, and, handing it over theatrically, said:
"Boys, nothing is too much for you."
The team gave him a standing ovation. The story quickly spread through different clubs and became one of those locker-room legends coaches loved to tell young players as a lesson. A man was late once in his life and handled it with such style. That is what a professional means. That is why he is a star. That is why the whole country loves Sasha Selivanov.
Selya smiled, remembering several chronic sponsors in different teams and the unbelievable stories connected with them. He lay in bed a little longer and felt with every cell in his brain how wonderful it was to belong to himself, not to hurry, not to be late, and not to live by the minute.
For the first month, Selya worked on the house. Over the years something had rusted, something needed repainting, something needed replacing. Of course the house had been looked after, but not as the owner himself would have done it, and Selya experienced almost physical pleasure from repairs, painting, purchases, and replacements. Then for two more months he traveled with his family from one seaside to another, rested, and spoiled his wife and children with everything he could. Then autumn came. The children started yet another new school, and for the first time Selya seriously asked himself what came next.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, he discovered that he missed the pleasant ache in his muscles in the evenings, the familiar pulsing soreness in his iron body after good work on the ice or in the gym. He missed the calm and satisfaction after winning games. Suddenly he realized he would never again hear the approving rumble of a stadium after a successful deke, or see the stands jump to their feet after a dagger of a shot that pierced the goaltender, or a goal scored with real craft. He would no longer feel the heat of the game or the breath of the arena.
He missed loud music in the locker room. He missed the exchanges between partners on the bench, everything brief, solid, to the point. Everyone exhausted, wrung dry, lips blue, breathing broken, pulse pushing two hundred, and yet ready to die for one another if necessary.
In the end, he was used to always going somewhere, flying somewhere. After convincing wins, he loved, like an emperor, looking down from the air at cities that seemed "ravaged, plundered, and abandoned." After losses, he would bite his lip in anger and promise himself he would get even next time. Pride and a thirst for revenge always woke in him after games he and his team had been forced to lose. And how the next opponents suffered when Selivanov, enraged and fired up by a recent defeat, stepped onto the ice in the following game and simply tore apart innocent clubs that had nothing to do with the previous defeat.
He missed a lot. He missed his old life. Who knows where those thoughts might have led him, toward the bottle, like many, or back to continuing his career, but everything changed one ordinary morning.
The phone rang.
It was the mayor.
Selya was a star, and he was not at all surprised when a pleasant but confident female voice on the other end informed him that she was calling from the city mayor's reception office and that Nikolai Petrovich Martynov wished to speak with him.
The mayor was brief and to the point. He thanked Selya for not moving to Moscow or abroad like many successful athletes, but had returned to his hometown, to his roots, to the place where he had begun. He said that the outdoor box where Selya had taken his first steps on the ice had been preserved and was still fully functioning. More than that, it had become one of the city's attractions, because the famous forward, goal scorer, and favorite of the entire city, Sasha Selivanov, had grown up on it.
Then the mayor invited Selya to city hall, saying that he wanted to meet the star of Russian hockey in person and, as if in passing, let him know that there were several proposals for Alexander Selivanov, an International Master of Sports.
At that moment Selya did not realize how fateful the call was. The realization came only during the meeting with Martynov inside the city administration building.
Selya arrived at the appointed time. Journalists were already waiting for him at the entrance to city hall.
Selya disliked the press. All of it. Over the many years of his successful career he had given hundreds, maybe thousands of interviews, but two things always irritated him in the press sharks, both big and small.
First, journalists were always badly prepared. They asked the same questions, or forced questions out of themselves on the spot, which made the conversation uninteresting and tiresome for everyone involved. It all turned into a formality. One person had to ask something. The other had to say something. Boredom and a waste of precious minutes of life, especially when those minutes had been scheduled for years ahead.
Second, the timing and place were always wrong. It was as if some curse seemed to hang over Selya: they always wanted to talk to him immediately after a game, when he was still, so to speak, in character. And not a short quick flash interview, but a long, expanded one with a heap of questions unrelated to hockey. And always at a time when he was drenched, pale, heart trying to tear out of his chest, pulse beyond human limits, after the brutal stress of a match, because hockey is a game where everything can turn even in the last seconds. He was a star. He had the biggest contract on the team. More than anyone, he carried responsibility for the result. All he wanted was to get to the locker room, sit down, drink some water, settle himself, and begin taking off his gear.
There were games after which he sat in the locker room in his stall for twenty minutes and could not so much as move, much less start untying his skates and changing. And at such a moment, when your legs are giving way, your breathing is barely returning, your thoughts are still in the game because it has not let you go, someone asks what you think about the resignation of the government. Or who the hero of our time is. Which theaters and plays you prefer. Whether you have pets.
And those questions are asked when the nervous system is raw and the physical condition is such that, in an average person, doctors would be calling time of death. How are you supposed to feel about such questions and such journalists? That is how the stereotype is born that all athletes are stupid. And all of them are ill-mannered boors.
"Try running ten kilometers and breaking forty minutes. I assure you that at the finish, if you even make it there, you will not remember your own address, let alone answer the questions you are asking me now," Selya once said in a television interview as he left the ice, drenched, after a dramatically lost match. More precisely, it was not an interview. The reporter was walking after him, not falling behind, asking questions, showing off for the camera, trying to seem intelligent, and Selya could not hold back. Unfortunately, it was live, and the whole country saw his outburst. The interesting thing was that the fans began loving him even more for it. But from then on, Selya ignored the press.
So outside city hall he politely greeted everyone but declined to speak.
"I should not have come here," Selya thought, climbing the front steps quickly. "Now the mayor will start asking for money for something. The journalists were not waiting for me for nothing." he thought skeptically as he approached the reception room.
But Selya was wrong. The mayor was a fan, a passionate hockey man and an a fan of Selya himself. With genuine emotion he told Selya what pride he had felt for his countryman when Selya scored decisive, turning-point goals for clubs and for the national team. How he had worried when Selya suffered serious injuries and how happy he was when Selya returned and again became the unstoppable Alexander Selivanov, nightmare of goaltenders and a thorn under the skin of defensemen.
Selya exhaled. He had not expected such a warm welcome, and gradually the mayor's enthusiasm turned into an ordinary conversation between two men about life, prospects, and plans.
"Can you believe it, Natasha?" Selya told his wife that evening. "Martynov offers me, this season, to go work as an assistant to Kocherov, to Vasilich. In the youth league. He's the head coach of the farm team."
"The one who coached you when you were a kid?"
"Yes, the same one." Selya smiled. "He was something, that coach. Always unshaven, always hungover. At one point he drank so badly that he carried carpets out of his house and sold them. Then he came to his senses and got himself treated. But that was already without me. You and I were living in Moscow then."
"And what, are you going to agree? Why do you need this?" Natalia sat down beside her husband. "This is going to be a long conversation, isn't it?"
"Vasilich always had the same drills in practice. We could do them with our eyes closed. As a methodologist, of course, he was useless. But in a game he could give advice. He loved hockey and understood it. We grew, you could say, on his advice, not on his practices."
"Sash, do not dodge." His wife smiled. "I asked you a question. Have you already decided? Have you already agreed?"
"Natash, Martynov suggests working with Vasilich for the first year, getting experience..."
"Sasha," his wife interrupted. "Do you hear yourself? You, Selivanov, a national team player," Natasha even half rose from her seat, "need to learn from a drunk? Maybe he should learn from you?"
"Natasha, it's the first year. You have to start somewhere. Martynov is offering me the youth team next season, and after another season, the first team. He is tired of hired outsiders. Invited coaches stay a season or two, no real results, none of our own boys in the team. They take care of their own business, leave, and after them there is nothing. Empty space. Scorched earth. Then the next one comes, and it all starts again. I know how it is done. Every coach brings in two or three lines of his own players. But they do not care about the city, the result, hockey, or the fans. They skim off the money and move on like touring performers to the next club. Martynov really cares about hockey. He told me straight: you are already a rich man, still young, ambitious, a real athlete, a hero. You will not work for money. You have enough of it. Results will matter to you. So we will lift our club and build a good arena."
"Road trips again. Again you will not be home for weeks." Natasha's eyes grew wet. "Yesterday I went to church, lit candles, thanked God that our family had found a home and peace."
"You jinxed it!" Selya smiled.
"I jinxed it," Natalia agreed, and smiled too.
She knew her husband was not one of those men who would be happy lying on the sofa at home, going fishing, and meeting the children after school. Her husband was Alexander Selivanov, a man, a winner, all character and unbending will. She was sure that after he finished playing, whatever Sasha took up, he would succeed. And she was not wrong.
Selya worked as an assistant in the youth league for only a few months, then took over the main team and, in three seasons, brought it into the country's top league. Martynov also kept his word and built an excellent modern sports complex with three hockey rinks at once, so the senior team and the boys had every necessary condition for training and growth. The owners of oil fields and steel mills again took notice of Selya. He was invited to head the richest clubs in the country, but Selya refused.
"I will work only at home until I win medals with my home club. I am not taking one foot out of my own swamp. If I go anywhere, it will only be as an assistant with the national team," Selya's position was unshakable.
A couple more years passed. Selya still had not won medals with his team, but he was invited to be an assistant with the national team. Naturally, he agreed. It was interesting to him, now as a coach, to work with the best players in the country. Besides, he had played with some of them himself and knew them very well. Every stint with the national team inspired him and gave him new strength and new ideas for working with his own team.
Selya still did not give interviews and did not speak with the press. The only exceptions were official postgame press conferences, which Selya, as head coach, had to attend.
In Petersburg, in another round, his team beat the army club with confidence. Selya, in an excellent mood, answered the journalists' questions and headed toward the bus. It was the final game of a five-game road series. The team was bringing home seventy percent of the possible points, which was not bad at all. More importantly, in an hour they would leave, then dinner, then the airport, and by morning he would be home.
"Alexander Nikolaevich, excuse me..." Selya heard behind him and turned around.
A young, very beautiful girl was walking briskly toward him.
"Yes," Selya said, smiling to himself, because the days when girls at rinks and stadiums came up to meet him were long gone.
"My name is Liza. I would like to interview you."
"You are a gorgeous girl, Liza," Selya smiled. "A real beauty." He said it sincerely, almost paternally. "But I do not give interviews. Forgive me." Selya was about to leave, but the girl had no intention of surrendering.
"I have a very interesting subject. I want to write about superstitions in hockey," she blurted out, understanding that Selivanov was about to walk away. If he turned and went, she would not be able to stop him or persuade him.
"That does not change anything."
"Alexander Nikolaevich, I am a student. The newspaper took me on as an intern. Everyone knows you do not give interviews. They even organized a betting pool in the newsroom, and I was the only one who bet on myself," Liza persisted, but Selivanov had already turned and started walking.
"Please. Please, be human about it. Make an exception. They promised to hire me full-time if I can do a strong piece with you."
"I'm sorry."
"I am from your hometown. You and I are from the same town. You are Sasha Selivanov. You are Selya. My whole family loves you. Please help me. You were young once too. People helped you too."
It was a cry from the heart, a last, desperate foul. Liza understood that if this did not work, nothing would.
Selya did not stop. He smiled.
"Stubborn girl, and a beauty too. She will go far," he thought. "On the other hand, she was right. When I came up to the senior team, Sam, Skory, Buba, and Pizhon were all famous players, and they still helped me. They played for me, gave me chances to score."
Selya stopped. He looked at his watch and said without turning around:
"Liza, I can give you no more than thirty minutes. We leave for the hotel soon, and then the plane. While the team gets ready and loads onto the bus, we can talk."
"Hurray!" Liza cried. She had already stopped hoping for a good outcome, and now she ran after Selya in her heels.
Selya invited the girl to the cafe. He ordered tea for himself, and coffee and ice cream for her.
"Are you hungry?" Selya asked.
"No, thank you. You are probably a good father," Liza smiled.
"I hope so." Selya smiled too. "All right, ask your questions."
"They are not exactly questions. More like a request for you to tell me about your signs, superstitions, maybe some traditions or rituals before a game, practice, or important game." She smiled. "Maybe you can tell me some story from when you were playing. Are there any superstitions you still follow now that you are already a coach? I would like to write something unusual. Maybe you can tell me details only insiders know, maybe about some talismans in the locker room you had then, or have now. What do you do or not do for luck? Which skate did you put on first? Which foot did you step onto the ice with? Did you let anyone use your sticks..."
Selya looked at his smart, beautiful countrywoman with pleasure. He had already stopped listening to her and was thinking that time passes, yet nothing changes. Once he too had grown wings and flown away. He had traveled a difficult road, at times even a heavy and unbearable one, had matured, had become somebody. Now it was Liza's turn. From a small Ural town she had come to Petersburg, to the big city. She was studying, trying to become somebody, and she would certainly succeed. Smart, quick, bold. One day his children would fly out of the nest too, and there would be no need to hold them back. Everyone can live only their own life.
"Are you listening to me?"
"Yes, Liza, I am listening."
"It seemed to me you were somewhere far away."
"No, I am here." Selya looked over the beautiful girl once more, was silent for a moment, and unexpectedly asked, "What street did you live on?"
"Lenin Street," Liza said, embarrassed.
"And what school did you finish?"
"Twenty-second."
"By the market?"
"Yes."
"Mine was nearby."
"I know," Liza interrupted. "You studied at Number Seven. You had a sports class."
"Correct." Now Selya was the one embarrassed. "How do you know that?"
"Who in our town does not know where Sasha Selivanov studied?"
Selya became even more embarrassed.
"I still cannot get used to it. I left as a kid. I only knew my friends in the yard and on the team. Now wherever I go now, people greet me, in the store, on the street. At first I felt shy, even uncomfortable. Now I greet everyone too. People like it. They smile. Where did your parents work?"
"My father is at the depot, a locomotive driver. My mother works at a school."
"Let me guess: Russian language and literature."
"Yes." Liza raised her beautiful eyebrows. "How did you know?"
"Journalism department, Petersburg. Someone must have given you a love for all this."
"Exactly." Liza blushed slightly. "You are very perceptive."
"For an athlete, you mean?"
"Well, yes. Please do not be offended." She flushed at once.
"Come on." Selya smiled, remembering how he had offered a reporter on national television to run a ten-kilometer race. "Let me tell you a secret." Selya paused and smiled again. "In sports, muscle alone does not bring victories or results. All great athletes, at least the ones I know personally, are extremely smart guys. It just so happened that they ended up in sport. They could have built rocket engines, or run a plant, a factory, or a regiment. It simply turned out that they became hockey players, wrestlers, gymnasts. Sport is an incredibly competitive environment. Standing out there is even harder than in ordinary life. So forget the stereotype that all athletes are morons. It is nothing like true."
Liza lowered her eyes. "I do not think that."
"Good. Your ice cream has melted. Want me to order another?"
"No, thank you. It is so interesting talking with you..." Liza saw a very imposing man approach Selya from behind and fell silent. He said something in Selya's ear, and Selya stood.
"Liza, I have to go."
"What about the interview?"
"Here is what we will do. I understand what you need. Give me your email, and I will write to you. You will make a strong piece out of it."
"Really?" Liza looked at Selya with disbelief, but just in case she wrote down her email address.
"Really." Selya smiled. "We are from the Urals. We have to help one another."
On the plane, Selya thought he might sleep, but he could not. He took out his laptop and decided to write a letter to Liza.
"Hello, Liza," he began. "I am not a master of writing and putting things into words, but I hope my essay will help you:
Put skates on starting with the left foot only, because it is more convenient. Do not shave on the eve of a game, for luck. In the playoffs, do not shave at all, by definition. In the bus and the locker room, sit only in your own place, for luck. Do not touch someone else's gear or sticks, because of the aura. No interviews or photos before a game, for luck. Put on your gear and step onto the ice only the way you are used to, and no other way, for luck. Do not cut your nails before a road trip, bad omen. Medals must be properly washed down, so more will follow. And so on, and so on, and so forth.
Luck, fortune, and breaks mean so much to players that they take superstitions, habits, and other things that may seem incomprehensible to ordinary people extremely seriously. I am not a superstitious man, but in every team where I played I observed all the customs and traditions accepted in that particular locker room, because if someone does not observe them, then it is no longer a team.
By the way, not all superstitions come out of nowhere. A lot of it can be explained.
For example, players do not give interviews before games. And they are right not to do it. Nobody knows how a game will go. You can say that you are in good shape and that your team will win, and everything can happen the other way. Then everyone will simply laugh at you, from your partners in the locker room to fans on their sofas with newspapers in their hands. Sport is unpredictable, and that is its beauty. Everything happens live, here and now, incredible miracles and tragedies both large and small. Nobody can be sure of anything until the final horn.
A little more common sense.
As I already mentioned, players do not let themselves be photographed before going onto the ice, whether it is a game or an ordinary practice. It is simple. You have your picture taken, jump onto the ice, and suffer a facial injury, some disfigurement that stays with you for life. That photograph was the last one where you looked like a human being. Coincidence, you say? Maybe. But hockey knows many such cases. People going to war also do not give interviews and do not let themselves be filmed or photographed. Why immortalize yourself ahead of time? So superstitions are a delicate thing, though there is plenty of nonsense too. With stupidity, at least, we have never had a shortage.
Sometimes a player has been scoring steadily and putting up points in every game. Fans adore him, the press worships him, teammates respect him, coaches cut him slack. Then he gives an interview before an ordinary game against a weak opponent, a small thing, and suddenly, with every following match, his life becomes a nightmare. He does not score. He does not set anyone up. Coaches are dissatisfied and sit him on the bench. When they let him play, he starts shaking, and in the end everything slips out of his hands. Nothing works at all. The poor guy begins looking for reasons in everything: himself, his partners, practices, coaches. What is wrong? He seems to be the same man, goes into every game to score, and there is no result. No points. But there are minor injuries and depression. Something has slipped, broken, cracked. Intuition suggests that he is doing something wrong, or has done something wrong.
Ah, yes. That little journalist, no offense. The interview before the game. It is all because of him.
Of course it is nonsense. But that is how a human being is built. That is how the psyche works. It needs something to grab onto. Everything has an explanation. You simply have to find something and cling to it in order to scramble out, twist free, and return everything to its former course. A person cannot live without faith, including faith that he has found the reason for his failures and now, knowing it, he will change everything.
In short, one can argue endlessly about what is superstition and what is common sense. In sport, superstitions exist and will exist. They must be approached delicately, like everything in life. The more talented a person is, the more finely he feels the situation, and it does not matter whether he is engaged in art or detective work. The more finely he feels and understands, the greater the chance he will not make a mistake, which means the greater the chance he will achieve success and results.
The subject of superstitions once interested me deeply. It happened by accident. I repeat, I never believed in them, and therefore never thought about them, until one day something happened that I did not expect.
Here is how it happened. I was a young coach, just starting out. It was my first season. I was working as an assistant to the head coach in the farm club. I helped train boys from seventeen to twenty-two. We started the season well. After the first ten rounds we were in the top five. The boys liked winning. We all tried very hard, and most importantly, we were able to win, by the way, despite everything. Our practices and preparation for games were such that you could hardly look at them without weeping. We played and won only because a good, skilled group of boys had gathered that year. I had long wanted to talk to the head coach about the training process, but while we were winning there was no point. The team was winning, collecting points, which meant he was doing everything right.
On the eve of departure for the next games, five of our players were taken to the first team. No disaster, Vasilich, the head coach, and I decided, and we announced to the boys that three lines and several reserves would travel. We had beaten the opposing team twice in the preseason, both times by a large margin, so we decided that even without our best fighting lineup, we would manage. We had two games to play.
On the day we left, Vasilich and I loaded our gloves, skates, and warm suits into a gear bag, and as the junior man, I took the sticks, carried everything to the bus, and put it together with the boys' gear.
When we arrived, we went straight from the road to the arena for the morning skate. There was no coaches' room in our visiting locker room, so I placed the gear bag in the corner so it would not get in the boys' way. The locker room was small, and by doing so I took the two places where Vasilich and I changed and prepared for skates and games.
We lost the first game. We started well, but early in the match we failed to score on several sure chances, and our opponents believed that it was not our day, that nothing would work for us today. Unfortunately for us, they got fired up and started flying around like madmen. We tried to keep up with them, but by the third period we were losing three to nothing. At the end of the game we bristled and snapped back, and scored two goals. Three-two is a dangerous score in hockey. We gathered ourselves with the last of our strength. For several shifts we camped around their net, then pulled the goalie and, to the joy of the local fans, gave up a goal in the final seconds while with six skaters. The game ended four-two. As I walked past the home locker room, I heard their joy and celebration.
Fine, I thought. Tomorrow we would get even.
After dinner at the hotel, in Vasilich's room, we talked it through, changed tactics, and tweaked the lineup. In the morning skate we rehearsed everything, and I had no doubt we would win. After the skate, I gathered all the coaches' things into the gear bag so that after the evening game I could take it already packed and carry it to the bus. I placed the unzipped bag not far from the locker-room exit so the boys could take our corner and settle in more comfortably. I did not zip it up because before the game that evening I wanted to put inside a towel that was drying on the shower door. After every time I step onto the ice, even if I have been there only a few minutes, I always take a shower.
The second game, like the first, began under our control, only this time we scored. In a fine mood, leading one to nothing, we came into the first intermission. The boys were playing well. We told them that and explained where they needed to add pressure in the second twenty minutes. We had about six minutes before returning to the ice. The team sat in a calm, relaxed state. Everyone was preparing for the battle to continue.
So as not to waste time, I decided to take down the towel, which had dried a little, and put it in the gear bag. I did exactly that, then zipped the bag and moved it farther from the passage so it would not interfere with the boys leaving through the door.
"Oh, we have a new guy," one of the players said, nodding at the bag. At the time I paid no attention to the phrase.
There were about two minutes left before we had to go. The boys stirred, began adjusting their gear, wiping the visors on their helmets, and tightening skate laces.
"Nikolaich, is this your first day in hockey?" Vasilich suddenly addressed me roughly. Not only roughly, but in front of the players.
The locker room went quiet. For a second, silence hung there.
I did not understand what was happening and looked at Vasilich questioningly, even challengingly.
"What do you mean?" I tensed.
"Why did you zip the gear bag? Do you not know that you cannot do that during a game? Is this your first day in hockey?"
"Not my first," I answered, trying to remain calm and still not understanding what the matter was. My tone cooled Vasilich, and he said to me more calmly, "Never do that. It is bad luck. Zip the gear bag, and that means that is it, the game is over."
The locker room stirred. Everyone exhaled.
"Want me to unzip it?"
"No need now. That's it, boys, let's go," the head coach said in a doomed voice and, head bowed, left the locker room first. The team moved toward the ice in grim silence.
I left the locker room last. I glanced at the gear bag and thought to myself, God forbid we lose.
We did not simply lose. We were torn apart and beaten up. We lost the second and third periods cleanly. We came nothing like the game we had played in the first twenty minutes. There were many minor injuries, and one of our boys had his back seriously injured at the boards. I saw the moment of the hit, heard his cry, and immediately understood it was bad. Under the tapping of sticks and the applause of the stands, the boy was carried off the ice on a stretcher and taken to the local hospital. We played out the rest miserably and left the ice with zero points. That was how that road trip ended.
On the way home after those hard games, the whole bus slept. I looked into the darkness and thought: superstitions, signs, I had nothing against them. But we did not lose because I zipped the gear bag. We played terribly in the second and third periods. They scored, and with every goal we allowed, we fell apart a little more. Everything can be explained, but the fact remained. We lost. That evening did not make me superstitious, but I have never again zipped a gear bag during a game in any locker room.
By the way, after that match Vasilich and I had a serious quarrel. Back home, before going out to practice, he reminded me about the gear bag, and he did it in a very unkind way. I got angry then and said:
"Vasilich, your superstitions come from insecurity. The boys need to be trained properly, not the way you train them, three drills for an entire season. They are doing the same thing I did with you twenty-five years ago, and hockey has changed a lot since then. I have wanted to talk with you about this for a long time."
In short, the coaches' room filled with swearing. That certainly does not flatter me, but it is what it is. I do not know how our confrontation would have ended, but soon afterward I was invited to work as head coach of the team where I remain to this day.
I do not know, Liza, whether these reflections will be useful to you, but the essence of superstitions is that any hockey player, like any athlete, steps onto the field, or the ice, not to play around but to win. If observing foolish rituals and omens helps get a victory, they will observe them.
With that, I say goodbye and am glad to have met you. When you are home, come to a game.
Respectfully, Alexander Selivanov."
Liza read the letter in the morning. She liked Selya's story and his reflections very much. She told her roommates in the dorm that she would not go to the first lectures, but would work. She understood that from this letter she could make an excellent piece.
"It will be a feature," she decided, and without letting herself be distracted by the conversations, preparations, and morning bustle of her roommates, she wrote that since childhood she had known who Sasha Selivanov was, how she had come to study in Petersburg, how a betting pool had been organized in the newsroom because everyone, from the correspondents to the editor, knew that Selivanov did not give interviews. She described in detail how she had already given up hope, but suddenly Selivanov had agreed. The centerpiece of the report was the story of the gear bag, which Alexander Nikolaevich Selivanov had written on the plane for her and for the readers.
The whole piece took no more than an hour, and Liza could still easily have made the second class, but she rushed to the newsroom. She wanted to surprise the editor and her colleagues.
She was not mistaken. Everyone was slightly stunned, but at the same time they sincerely congratulated her on her baptism by fire. The editor said that a few things needed correcting, but overall:
"The text is excellent. You will make something of yourself, Elizaveta. Since you have set the bar this high, since you have risen to this level, try to hold it. And you, gentlemen," he said to the colleagues, "prepare your money. She won the betting pool."
It was one of the happiest days of Liza's life. When the newspaper issue came out, she cut out her report under the title "The Gear Bag" and sent the page to Selya not by email, but by regular mail, adding on a separate sheet that she was very grateful to him and that the story of the gear bag had become life-changing for her, her entrance ticket into journalism, into the profession she had dreamed of since childhood.
After receiving the letter from Petersburg, Selya read it all with interest. Then he took another envelope, placed Liza's newspaper clipping inside, and wrote a letter to his first coach, Yuri Vasilyevich Kocherov. In it he apologized for all the words he had thrown out in anger back then in the coaches' room, thanked him for his first steps on the ice, and at the end added that the ill-fated gear bag had made the two of them quarrel, but had helped another person, as hockey players say, "get into the game."
Selya briefly told the story of the young, beautiful, and stubborn journalist, their countrywoman, apologized once more, and at the end wrote:
"Do not hold it against me, Vasilich. Life has many sides. It is much more interesting and more complicated than we think. Take care of yourself and be well.
Sasha Selivanov.
2009"
The Player
There are far more people in life
who give up
than people who lose.
Sport is just like life, only much harder. Everything is more concise, more definite, and harsher. Hundredths of a second separate triumph from failure. Years of training, restrictions, and torment, a life thrown down, or rather willingly laid, on the chopping block of sport, can come to nothing because of one hundredth of a second. Sport is always all-in. No extensions, no installment plans, no shades of gray. Only here and now.
Valery Dmitrievich Stolbov, Honored Coach of Russia, knew that sad truth better than most. That was why he was walking toward the coaches' room of the senior team with very little hope that the conversation would lead anywhere.
For the first time in many years, Stolbov had a real player in his youth system.
The boy was still skinny, had not yet filled out with muscle, and at first glance even looked frail and slightly stooped because of his height. But he had unusual skill, a unique ability to beat opponents one-on-one, powerful and fast skating, excellent hockey sense, a scorer's touch, and a remarkably sharp hockey mind. He read hockey as if he had been born for nothing else.
Stolbov, himself a famous player and outstanding master in his day, could see that the boy was still unfinished in many ways. There was plenty to work on and many buckets of sweat still to spill. But at the same time, you would have to be blind not to see the hockey glow coming off Misha Gromov.
"Sport isn't only disappointment, broken careers, and ruined lives. Miracles happen too," Stolbov reassured himself as he prepared for the conversation. "A word of advice at exactly the right moment. A lucky break. A competitor getting hurt unexpectedly. A coach giving you absolute support and trust and throwing you straight into the middle of things. Unshakable belief in yourself. That X factor, when against all odds a man becomes a champion and a star. Besides, I'm not going in there to ask for myself. I'm asking for the sake of the game." Stolbov sighed heavily, hesitated, and knocked on the door.
"Well, Grom, if this works out, you'll be buying my drinks for the rest of your life," Stolbov thought with a grin as he stepped into the coaches' room.
He was calm now. Just as before an important game or a deciding match, something reckless had come alive in him, a boldness bordering on madness, pressure, drive, and the need to win at any cost. In his younger days there had been games he wanted to win so badly that he would willingly have traded a year of his life for the victory. And the more hopeless the situation became, the more wild daring rose inside him, along with an almost boundless, Alexander-the-Great state of mind in which anything seemed possible.
"Two-two. Final shift. Faceoff in their zone. Let's go," Stolbov told himself, then greeted everyone loudly.
"Oh, Stolbik, my friend. Come in."
Nikolai Alekseyevich Zotov, head coach of the club and once Stolbov's linemate on the same forward line, known back then simply as Zot, greeted Valery Dmitrievich warmly. All of Zotov's assistants were in the room as well.
Zotov and Stolbov had been friends since they were young. On the ice and away from it, they had been inseparable. After they married, their families became close too. They vacationed together in summer and met whenever they had the slightest chance. Even after changing clubs, they never lost touch.
They had taken different roads into coaching. Stolbov had been the brighter player. Zotov became the more successful coach. Neither fact had ever mattered between them. Their friendship had always remained easy and warm.
At one point both men were invited to the capital: Zotov to take charge of the senior team and Stolbov to run the farm club. That was how they ended up settling in Moscow.
Despite working in the same arena, they rarely saw one another. Their teams took all their time, and their schedules were different. If the senior team was at home, the farm team was on the road, and vice versa. That was why Zotov was so genuinely glad to see Stolbov standing in the doorway.
"Just my luck," Stolbov thought as he greeted the entire coaching staff. He had hoped to speak to Zot one-on-one. Apparently that was not going to happen.
"Maybe it's better this way," he told himself. "We'll all talk together. This isn't exactly an ordinary case. You could call it unique. More opinions should mean better odds, at least according to the theory of probability." Stolbov grabbed at the thought like a drowning man at a straw.
Zotov's assistants had also been well-known players in their time. Like Zotov and Stolbov, they had grown up as ordinary boys on the industrial outskirts of town, lucky enough to have an ice palace built nearby. They came from working families and had earned everything themselves.
They had spent their entire hockey lives according to conscience and the harsh laws of sport. They faced everything head-on. They did not sell anyone out, betray anyone, or scheme to get rid of people. They had never been cowards or penny-pinchers at someone else's expense. Because of that, they carried considerable authority both with club management and among the players.
"Their opinion will carry weight too. And Zot listens to them when it matters," Stolbov decided, finally settling himself. Without any unnecessary ceremony, he went straight to the point.
"Alekseich, I'm here about Gromov..." Stolbov began uncertainly.
"Valera, you never were much of a diplomat," Zotov said with a smile.
"Neither were you."
At that moment Stolbov understood that he could probably turn around and leave. There would be no real conversation. Or there would be one, but it would end the way these conversations always ended: nowhere.
They had been working in tandem for years. The club that had hired them together had counted on the fact that the two coaches, both brilliant former hockey players who had once played shoulder to shoulder and understood each other from half a word or half a glance, would create something similar with their teams. They were supposed to coordinate tactics and training and build a single system.
Stolbov's assignment was to develop young players in the farm club so that, once trained and prepared, they could move up to the first team without hesitation, already knowing exactly what their role was in every element of the game.
Stolbov earned his salary honestly. Every summer he sent five or six players to the first team. Like little soldiers, they worked the entire preseason from the first whistle to the last. And Zotov cut every one of them.
Stolbov would get angry and argue, but Zotov's reasoning was always harder than iron.
"Dmitrich, my dear friend," Zotov would say. "You know the level of this league. Where are those green kids supposed to go against tanks?"
"I'm not arguing that they're young. But they're good kids. They'll take some hits, grow up, get stronger. Maybe not right away, but eventually they can play. At least keep them with the team. They don't have to go straight into the lineup."
"I can't. If I keep them, I have to sign them. And how am I supposed to sign a player when I know for a fact he won't play because he's simply not ready? They've got a long way to go before they reach our level."
"Agreed. They don't have experience. But where are they supposed to get it if you won't let them play? You won't even give them a chance. We were young once too, remember? They let us play. Maybe only until our first mistake, but they let us."
"Valera, those were different times. Back then every team played its own boys, players raised in its own system. You and I were lucky our home club happened to produce such hotshots. Things are different now. You can play whoever you want, but management wants points and wins. Your boys are good. Work with some of them, let them play a couple of seasons, make mistakes, settle down, mature physically, and they'll be able to play. But by then they'll have cost me my job. I don't have time for their mistakes. I need wins and medals here and now."
They had conversations like that every autumn before the season began.
Naturally, Stolbov was furious that so much of his work seemed to go to waste. His players left for other teams and, sooner or later, many of them reached the country's top league. That flattered his pride but brought him no real satisfaction. He wanted boys from his farm team to move up to Zotov and continue developing inside their own club system, not someone else's. Objectively, though, he understood Zotov's argument.
Any wealthy club, and theirs was an extremely wealthy club, could become a golden cage for a young player. Even if you were talented, they could sign you and sit you on the bench.
How was a kid supposed to break into the lineup when half the national team was already playing there?
So although Stolbov kept pushing Zotov, he knew perfectly well that his boys might never get the chance to compete as equals with Zot's established stars. Unless, of course, one truly exceptional young player appeared. A player who made coaches, teammates, and opponents stop and watch in fascination.
Stolbov's instincts told him Grom would be the first one to move one of the club's expensive stars out of a roster spot. Maybe not immediately, but it would happen.
That was why Stolbov had decided to handle Gromov differently. The boy was so bright, so original, that Valery Dmitrievich decided not to wait until the end of the season. If he did everything the way he always had, he would get the same result he always got. So Stolbov decided to bring Misha to Zotov in November.
"Zot may reject him immediately. But in spring he'll look at him differently. By then the kid will have improved," Stolbov had thought, and of that he had no doubt. "Then maybe in preseason he'll get into a few exhibition games and find a way to stick."
But after Zotov's remark about Stolbov never being a diplomat, the brilliant combination the farm-club coach had constructed in his head collapsed before it had even taken shape.
"Why did I have to snap back at him? 'Neither were you.' And in front of his assistants. I probably shouldn't have started this conversation with them here at all." Silence settled over the room. The coaches exchanged glances and smiled.
"Don't get mad, Valera. That's exactly why everyone respects you," Zotov said. "You don't bend, you don't dance around people, you always say what you think. And you stand up for your boys." He nodded toward his assistants.
"The guys are smiling because we had a meeting with the club president before morning practice. He told us the owner is giving us additional money. Says we need to strengthen the roster before the playoffs. Can you imagine? Us. Our fifth five-man unit would be a second unit on almost any other club. I tell him, 'Vladimir Nikolaevich, strengthen with whom? All the best players are already here.' And he says, 'Look around. See who's available in America, in Canada. Maybe you can sign somebody from the NHL.'"
"I understand. I should probably go," Stolbov said, getting to his feet without looking at anyone.
"Oh, sit down," Zotov said, smiling sincerely and even half rising from his chair. "Why are you getting worked up? What kind of kid is this? Why do you want me to look at him in the middle of the season?"
"Because he's a player, Kolya. A real player. He's going to grow into a great one."
"Exactly. Going to, Valera. I need somebody now. You know our standards."
"I know. Take him for a couple of practices. Just look at him. I've never asked you for anything like this before, but this kid has been kissed by God. He's going to be a real star."
"Is Gromov the one wearing number ten?" the defense coach joined in.
"Yes. Number ten. Misha Gromov." Stolbov immediately came alive.
"Nikolai Alekseyevich, I've seen him in a few games. Skilled. Interesting in places. But he doesn't work hard enough. Looks like a middle-of-the-pack player to me."
"He doesn't work because he's bored," Stolbov defended him. "Everything comes too easily to him. He's outgrown the farm-club level. I tell him myself, 'Grom, why are you screwing around? You scored three, so score ten more. Why do you stop playing? Doesn't your name look good on the scoreboard? Don't you care about your stats?'"
"And what does he say?" Zotov asked with interest.
"He says three is enough to win."
"Alekseich, he's skinny. Our men will snap him in half on the first physical battle. And he won't handle the weights either. He's too weak for our workload."
"The weights, yes. I agree. We'll have to bring him along gradually. I'm deliberately not pushing that. He's still growing. He's sixteen, practically a child. But nobody's going to snap him in half. Let your guys try catching him first, let alone hitting him. I ran skating tests the other day. He trails maybe three of your guys in those tests. Four at most."
"Come on. Are you serious?" Zotov's eyebrows went up. "You know we're one of the best-conditioned teams in the league. Opponents stay with our pace for a period and a half, maybe two at most. In the third we tear them apart. We win third periods by two, three, sometimes four goals."
"Zot, this kid is a player. I wouldn't be here if he weren't that good. Just look at him." Zotov was quiet for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he agreed.
"All right. We don't really lose anything. We'll take him. Tell him to come to evening practice today. Even if we cut him immediately, it'll still be an experience for the boy. At least he'll have something to remember." Stolbov nodded approvingly. It was not a victory yet, but it was something.
________________________________________
Once Grom stepped onto the ice with the senior players, he neither froze nor faded.
Zotov had been afraid that Misha Gromov, still very young and unfamiliar with the drills, would slow the entire team down. To his surprise, the boy went through them calmly, naturally, even with a certain polish.
"Stolbik's done a good job," Zotov thought. "He's carrying his end of the load exactly the way he's supposed to. The kid's been taught properly. Beautiful to watch."
Zotov winked at Stolbov, who was watching practice from the stands and following Grom closely without taking his eyes off him. Among the big, fully grown players, the young Grom still looked awkward and unfinished.
Stolbov ran almost all the same drills with his farm club that Zotov used with the first team. So everything on the ice was familiar to Misha Gromov. The only difference was that the guys flying around him weighed twenty or thirty kilos more than the players he was used to.
Sitting alone in the enormous empty stands, Stolbov was a little nervous, but Grom looked solid. He made no mistakes. He did not rush. There was no fear in his eyes.
During warmup and the first couple of drills, the veteran players glanced at him with interest. But you can tell a bird by the way it flies. They quickly recognized him as an equal and turned their attention back to themselves. The monotonous, routine work of practice took over.
Grom did not fall behind anywhere and did nothing to attract attention. On the ice there was one unified, first-class team. The only thing that distinguished him from the rest was the full face cage he was required to wear until he turned eighteen.
As the team left the ice, Zotov skated over to the boards and shouted to Stolbov that they would keep Gromov for another couple of days. Stolbov nodded again. This time it was a small victory.
Every young player Stolbov had previously sent to the first team had been accepted by Zotov because that was the arrangement. In practice, Zotov looked straight through them as if they were not even on the ice. This time he had shown interest on his own. "Looks like Misha caught his eye. Something about the kid must have appealed to him."
________________________________________
Grom spent the next two days entirely on the senior team's schedule.
He did everything calmly and with confidence. Experienced as he was, Zotov could see the boy was nervous, but Grom never showed it. "Not bad for a start," Zotov thought. From that moment on, he began watching Grom with real interest.
"The team has accepted him too. He laughs with everybody, jokes, they give him a hard time, and he gives it right back. There must be something in this kid if our animals are already talking to him like an equal." Zotov kept Grom for another couple of days.
________________________________________
The league schedule had paused for national-team games, and exhibition games were planned for the weekend to keep the club sharp.
To Stolbov's surprise, Grom made the lineup for the first one.
Only on the fourth five-man unit, but with Zotov it was hard enough to make even the fifth unit, the one that did not play. There was nobody easy to move out. That was how talented Zotov's roster was.
Zotov and Stolbov watched the game from the stands. The assistants ran the bench. Grom stepped onto the ice for his first shift. And scored. Zotov laughed until tears came to his eyes.
"Valera, we have a general manager, a scouting department covering all of Russia, scouts in Europe and America, all of them making enormous salaries, and nobody has any idea what's growing in our own backyard!"
"Go ahead, laugh," Stolbov said with a smile as he watched Grom's teammates congratulate him on his first goal. On the bench, they took the puck from the officials and handed it to him as a keepsake.
"But I don't approve of that laugh, Kolya. Even now I can see you still don't take this kid seriously. And you're making a mistake." Stolbov stopped smiling.
He suddenly understood that even if Grom scored ten more goals, it would change nothing. Grom did not score ten. But midway through the third period, he scored one more. And he did it like a master.
He picked up the puck behind his own net and carried it the length of the ice, weaving past opponents. As he approached the other goal, he deliberately began to slow down. His eyes darted around nervously as if searching for teammates. He made it look as though he had become confused, lost his nerve. The goalie saw it.
He decided the kid was rattled, gave a little smirk, and shifted his attention toward the other two forwards.
Grom, still looking around and not even appearing to glance at the net, shot the puck himself. And scored.
The puck fluttered in the net like a trapped bird, then dropped onto the ice behind the goaltender. For a moment there was silence. Then both benches erupted.
His own team and the opponents alike appreciated the extraordinary move from the slightly stooped, awkward-looking young player. After that goal, both sides recognized him as a player. Not as their equal yet, but as someone who would go farther than many of them.
Grom's teammates mobbed him again, shaking him and congratulating him. The goalie, realizing that he had simply been sold a perfect fake, stared in disbelief first at his defensemen, then at Grom buried beneath teammates, then at the suddenly animated benches.
He had never seen anything like it: some young kid in a cage had played with the cold calculation of a seasoned, crafty master. Grom had done nothing unnecessary. He had given nothing away. He had played the whole thing perfectly. Grom had planned the move from the very first touch of the puck behind his own net.
He knew they would let him get to the far end. First, it was an exhibition game. Nobody was going to tear himself apart trying to race him. Second, nobody was going to hammer a young player wearing a full cage. They would make contact, show that they were there, but nothing more.
The important part was to look convincingly lost and start searching for teammates with frightened eyes. Hockey is like cards: whoever screws the other guy wins. Stolbov had taught Grom that simple truth.
"In our business, Misha," Stolbov had explained to him once, "there are two things you have to understand.
"First, a game is like driving a car. You have to think for yourself, for the people driving beside you, for the people in the next lane, and for the ones coming straight at you. For pedestrians too. Basically, for every idiot who might jump under your wheels, cut you off, cross the center line, change lanes at the wrong moment, break down, or stop.
"So you always have to keep the right distance, calculate their trajectories, and have options. Do you brake? Go around? Accelerate?
"The situation changes constantly, both on the road and in hockey. So you always have to calculate ahead and always have alternatives. You have to think for yourself, for your teammates, and for your opponents.
"You enter the zone and you know your linemate is selfish and won't pass. He's going to shoot. So you don't even bother looking at him. You drive straight to the net because he's an idiot. He's not going to share the puck anyway. When he shoots and the goalie gives up a rebound, you'll be first on it and put away the rebound because the goalie will have committed everything to the first shot and will be frozen for a split second. And you worked all of that out while you were still crossing the blue line.
"The second thing you have to understand is this: hockey, like all team sports, is built on showing one thing and doing something completely different.
"You want to make a pass? Make everyone believe you're an idiot and that this puck is the last one you'll ever touch in your life. Settle it on your stick. Drop your eyes to the ice. Let everybody think you're about to skate with it.
"Naturally, two or three opponents will come after you. Let them get closer. Then beat two or three of them with a single pass. Just don't rush too soon and scare them off.
"The better the player, Misha, the longer he can hold the pause.
"Let them come closer, then calmly cut them out of the play. They'll swear at themselves afterward, of course, but your teammates will already be far behind them and gone the other way on the rush.
"All the great players were great actors. They could bluff well enough to make any card shark jealous.
"And the pauses they could hold...
"That's hockey, Misha. All of it."
Grom had already stood out among players his age, but after Stolbov opened the door to those higher mysteries of hockey, things most players could barely understand, Grom changed. Stolbov had not shown him the basics, but the heights of hockey. Once Grom understood it and believed in it, he began to play for real. That was when Stolbov first saw the Player in him.
His delicate, almost surgical decisions, always unconventional and sometimes simply audacious, more than once made Stolbov raise his eyebrows in surprise.
Stolbov had thought he knew everything hockey had to offer, that he had already seen it all. Grom proved to him again and again that nobody could know everything. That was the beauty of hockey.
It was unpredictable, and there was no limit to perfection in it. The game was always developing, and the ones who moved it forward were players, Players with a capital P.

When Grom's teammates finally stopped shaking him and congratulating him on such a magnificent goal, Misha Gromov skated to the boards and pointed a finger at Stolbov. Everyone on the ice, teammates and opponents alike, began tapping their sticks. Every seasoned gladiator there understood what the gesture meant: Grom was dedicating the goal to Stolbov, a student thanking his master, a player thanking his coach.
Stolbov nodded approvingly and shouted with almost fatherly pride:
"Attaboy, Grom! What a goal!" Zotov smiled too and gave an approving wink. There are no former players.
By profession, Zotov was a coach. In his very essence, he had always been and remained a player. And as a player, he appreciated exactly what Grom had done. Like a sly fox, the kid had calculated everything and executed it perfectly.
Zotov congratulated Stolbov, but Stolbov's euphoria had already passed. Once again he sat composed and calm.
"Why so gloomy, Stolbik? You should be happy you've got kids like that."
"I just realized something. You can't keep talent like that under wraps. If you don't take him, he'll leave somewhere else next year anyway. He's too bright a player. It'll be a long time before another one like him comes along."
"Don't be sad, Valery Dmitrievich. He's not going anywhere. We'll keep him. Tell him today to move his stuff into our locker room. And he'll point that finger at you plenty more times, I promise. The kid has rare talent. If success doesn't go to his head, he'll become a real star."
"What have I been telling you?"
"All right, all right. My fault for not seeing what was right under my nose. Come on, Valera. Let's go have some cognac in the coaches' room. I'll make you tea with lemon, the way you like it. There's nothing more we need to see here. I've already seen everything I needed."
Zotov waved to his assistants, and he and Stolbov headed toward the locker room.
Still on the ice, Grom saw the coaches leaving from the corner of his eye and, like a true player, calculated this situation too. Apparently his stall would be by the sauna entrance. It was the only open spot in the senior team's locker room.
________________________________________
A few years later, Grom left for the NHL. He made his mark there too.
He always came gladly when called to the national team and played in the Olympics and World Championships.
He never missed an opportunity to call Valery Dmitrievich Stolbov, the coach who had given him his start and opened the door to professional hockey.
He called not only on birthdays or New Year's. He might call after a good game simply to ask about Stolbov's health and how things were going, or to say he would be in Moscow and arrange to meet. He always brought souvenirs and gifts. Stolbov appreciated the attention from his former player. So many had grown wings and flown away. Misha remembered. He had not forgotten. He was always grateful for that extraordinary chance.
"That's why he's a star," Stolbov would sometimes tell young hockey players when he told them Grom's story. "Being a master isn't just goals and assists. A master is how he gets dressed, how he steps onto the ice. The stands are roaring, people are going crazy, noise everywhere, and he's calm. He knows they all came to see him. He's focused. He warms up properly. Nothing distracts him.
"There are no little things, boys. Everything matters.
"Luck will always smile on the stubborn and hardworking. Your chance will come. It definitely will. When those fifteen seconds come, you have to show every bit of talent you have.
"It's like school," Stolbov would say with a grin. "If you do your homework every day and you're always prepared, sooner or later they'll call you to the board and you'll get your A.
"That means you have to wait for your chance all the time. Prepare for it all the time. Most importantly, you have to be ready when it comes. Don't panic. Don't fall apart. Don't lose yourself.
"If you've worked, if you've believed in yourself and in your star, then one way or another things will come together. Your star will rise.
"That's how it was with Grom. They didn't even want to look at him. Then he stepped onto the ice and said what he had to say in two words.
"And everybody understood there was a Player standing in front of them.
"And boys, it's not only like that in sport. Life works the same way. You always have to believe in yourself and keep moving toward your goal, toward your dream.
"The chance to show yourself, to prove yourself, will come."
The young players always listened to Stolbov with their mouths open and remembered every word.
Everyone knew the story of Grom. That was why they valued Stolbov as a coach and respected him deeply as a man.
Every graduating group, everyone who passed through the youth program, every player on the farm team was ready to die for his coach, never mind skate an extra lap, do five more sprints, or kill a penalty with only three skaters. Stolbov's authority was absolute because he had earned it.
Everyone knew that Stolbov could see players, that he valued them and helped them open up. Even the ones who had little chance of making it, he still tried to help.
That was why, whenever Stolbov began speaking in the locker room, not merely silence but an almost vacuum-like silence settled over the room. Everyone stopped talking, even the boys who already had one foot in professional hockey.
They tried not to miss a single word, a single thought, a single hint from the hardened former player and experienced coach standing before them. Stolbov loved those moments.
Sharing what mattered most to him, he understood perfectly well that not all of those boys would become hockey players.
But he firmly believed that some of his ideas, hockey stories, parables, and observations would help them make something of themselves in life. It did not matter what they became. What mattered was that they grew into decent people and men who believed in themselves.
2018

Lucky
The entire league was convinced that Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov was a lucky coach.
Rarely did Belyakov finish a season without a championship or at least a place on the podium. And he won medals with every kind of club: oligarch-owned powerhouses stacked with national-team players, high-priced foreign stars, and the country's best young hockey players, some of whom had already won U18 or World Junior championships; and middle-of-the-pack teams built around homegrown players earning modest salaries by hockey standards, without flashy imported stars or high-priced foreign players. Clubs hired Belyakov to accomplish specific goals, and one way or another, he accomplished them. Sometimes against all odds. At least, that was how it looked to outsiders.
Those who knew the game from the inside, however, were even more convinced that Bely, as everyone called him, wasn't merely lucky. He was the kind of man luck seemed to follow everywhere.
"He's got the luck. What can you do?" stronger opponents would lament after losing to him in a semifinal or final. "We've got the money, the names, the roster. He's got the luck," owners and presidents of wealthy clubs would say bitterly after a defeat.
"We're not going to see gold or a Cup until we lure Bely over here," more than one executive would declare at the postmortem after a disappointing or disastrous season. "Belyakov is a hell of a coach, and luck is always with him. Start talking to him..."
Belyakov almost believed in his own luck himself. How could he not, when every spring, every playoff season, beginning two weeks before the elimination games, every sports newspaper and television channel in the country seemed to talk about nothing else? Can Belyakov lead one of the league's less affluent clubs to the medals again this season? Say luck, think Belyakov. How will the oligarch clubs answer Belyakov's luck this time? With money again, or perhaps finally with some actual hockey?
What miracles will Belyakov work with his latest band of warriors on ice in these playoffs? In principle, all the noise and excitement surrounding his teams, and Belyakov himself, suited him just fine. As the saying went, there was no such thing as bad publicity except an obituary. As long as people were talking about you, there would always be work and bread on the table.
More than that, the extra fame and attention helped when dealing with club owners, both before a contract was signed and afterward. A hockey season was lo-o-ong, and there were plenty of moments when nerves began to fray. Belyakov was a public figure, and that bought him a certain amount of patience. Another coach might have been thrown out into the cold after a losing streak dragged on too long. Belyakov got another chance. Then another. And somehow, he always found a way out. The aura of luck surrounding him, inflated by journalists and strengthened by one improbable coincidence after another, also helped Pyotr Ivanovich when he recruited players or tried to lure them away from other clubs. Belyakov himself had no illusions about his "luck." There had always been big money in hockey, so plenty of hockey players had money. But winning medals, lifting a Cup, becoming the best and the strongest, that carried prestige. That meant something.
A medal might spend years gathering dust in a cabinet, but the title of Russian champion, or even medalist, stayed with you for life. It was a step into history.
And so plenty of players were happy to join Belyakov's teams.
"If there's one guy who'll get us into the medals, it's Bely," the players would say, almost as though the result were already settled, and calmly sign their contracts.
And, of course, the fans worshipped Belyakov's luck. WHERE BELY GOES, VICTORY FOLLOWS! Banners and signs carrying slogans like that appeared constantly in arenas, at home games and on the road. Television crews loved them. Whenever Belyakov's team was losing, the cameras would zoom in on one of those banners and broadcast it across the country.
The game itself would eventually be forgotten. The image of the lucky coach would remain. By then, no defeat could do much damage to Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov's reputation. Sometimes Belyakov allowed himself the pleasant thought that perhaps he really was somehow special. Chosen. A favorite of the sporting gods.
Or maybe he was simply a decent man who lived honestly and according to his conscience, and when things became desperate, the universe repaid him for all the good he put into the world. People believed in him. He gave his players hope, confidence, and belief in success. His victories brought joy and happiness to hundreds of thousands of fans. Perhaps, in return for all that, when disaster stood half a step away, the universe reached down and gave him a hand.
Belyakov enjoyed thoughts like these, but he did not indulge them often. He had no illusions about himself and never put a crown on his own head. He did not deny being lucky, but neither did he try to convince anyone that he was, or wasn't.
"If people want to believe in my luck, that's fine with me. Anything that helps the cause, I'm all for it."
And so, at every postgame press conference, regardless of how his team had played, Belyakov made sure to toss out a joke or two, a hint, some ambiguous little remark that only fueled the public fascination with him, his luck, good fortune, and all the other supernatural forces people so desperately wanted to believe in.
But the thing Belyakov truly believed in, sincerely and without reservation, the thing that had actually brought him success and medals year after year, he kept secret. Every coach has his secrets. Belyakov had his. His secret, if it could really be called a secret, was that hockey players were the ones who played the game, and the outcome of every game depended on them.
Not necessarily all of them. In reality, five or six players could determine the result. The rest helped. But you had to choose both groups correctly.
Recruitment.
That was Belyakov's great strength. Year after year, it was what carried him through and put not only bread on his table but a generous layer of butter on it too. When he was young, Petya Belyakov had never been a star or a flashy player. He was a solid center, an honest workhorse. He was the dependable center of the second or third five-man unit, which meant that over his long playing career he had to do a little of everything: lead the attack, play on the second power-play unit, help the defense when he was moved lower in the lineup, and kill penalties when he dropped to the third or sometimes even fourth line.
Centers, whose decisions largely shape how an entire five-man unit functions, are also relentless workhorses. They have to help the defensemen win the puck in their own zone, start the attack, join the rush and, if things break right, finish it with a goal. Or at least a shot. And if the puck is lost at the other end, they have to get back in time to help defensively, win possession again, and start all over. At some point Petya Belyakov, Bely to everyone on the team, realized that no matter how fast you skated, you still couldn't be everywhere on the ice. There was a reason hockey people said it was better to be standing in the right place than skating around like an idiot.
So he began studying his linemates closely and methodically. Depending on their strengths and weaknesses, he chose his position and his approach: aggressive when he could afford to be, cautious and mindful of his own net when he could not. Instead of racing like a madman from one end of the rink to the other, he tried to calculate the situation two or three moves ahead and be where he needed to be for that particular play. Some players were puck hogs. Others moved the puck. The latter were easy and enjoyable to play with. Some were honest, combative, stubborn workers who immediately fought to get the puck back after losing it. Others were floaters who counted on their teammates and, at the first sign of trouble, simply checked out of the play.
Whenever Bely played with floaters, he concentrated more on defense. No gambling, no quick adventures toward the other net, no deep involvement in the attack. He was always the third man high. There was no point getting carried away offensively when he knew the play would die on the floater's stick and he would have to race sixty meters back into his own zone to help the defensemen.
Better to anticipate all of that and choose the right position from the start. And that was only the beginning of his research. Moving from the qualities every player possessed, technique, physical strength, speed, to the specific demands of each position, Bely seriously analyzed every winger, defenseman, center, and goalie on his team.
The more he did it, the more convinced he became that his theory worked. It allowed him to understand hockey at a subtler level and, as a result, play better and more effectively while spending less energy. Once he had a complete picture of his teammates, he began studying opponents. And he came to an unexpected conclusion. There really weren't that many different types and subtypes of hockey players. On any team. His intelligence helped Bely grow into an excellent center, and he played not only in Russia but abroad as well. His theory worked there too. Regardless of language, skin color, or level of competition, players could be divided into stars who could do everything, score in any game, and almost never leave the ice without a goal; reliable skilled players who knew all the tricks too, but lacked the brilliance and subtlety of the stars; workhorses, rock-solid men you could rely on at any moment and in any situation; fighters, scrappers with unbreakable character who bent like iron but did not break; and also cowards, show-offs, floaters, crafty defensemen who could play like seasoned forwards, hard-nosed defensemen whose very appearance terrified opponents, wooden defensemen who could barely do anything properly, and so on.
Bely's classification eventually contained more than thirty types of players and their variations. During long flights and bus rides, on rainy and snowy evenings in hotels and at the team base, he described them all in detail.
Those notes, the analysis and systematization of his entire hockey life, were what eventually allowed Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov to establish himself as a coach. For the last fifteen years, Belyakov had worked in the country's premier league. Without revealing his secrets to anyone, he built every one of his teams according to the same basic model. Given the league's regulations and the country's economic realities, he divided players into six main categories: stars, reliable players, goalies, imports, veterans, and young players. But later, drawing on his coaching experience and life experience, Belyakov formulated something even more important. It wasn't enough to select them correctly. You had to understand them correctly. You had to understand what drove them.
How, for example, do you make a player who already has everything, medals, businesses, real estate in Miami, Stanley Cup rings from the NHL, the strongest league in the world, go out night after night and play every game as though it were his last? Belyakov began studying psychology. He attended lectures that were not always interesting and were sometimes downright tedious. He read textbooks and articles without understanding half the terminology. He consulted sports psychologists from other sports and different national teams.
And unexpectedly, he discovered an entire world built around one central word: motivation. That was what made players do everything they were capable of, and then a little more. Drawing on his enormous experience as a player, his already considerable coaching experience, and the scientific foundation he had acquired, Belyakov concluded that, depending on age and status, players were driven by five basic motives:
money, career advancement, ambition, ego, and enjoyment of the game. Once Belyakov managed, first in his own head and then on paper, to bring all his player types and their dominant motivations together into a single system, he became Lucky.
Lucky, and one of the most successful and sought-after coaches in the league.
"Everybody plays for money," Belyakov believed. "Some play for money and something else too: for the club, for the city, for the coach, for the name on the back of their jersey. But everybody plays for money."
That was the world's experience, and Belyakov's own.
When he was a player, and later when he became a coach, money decided everything. So among all the motives that made hockey players give everything they had on the ice and then a little more, Belyakov considered money the main and dominant factor.
"The financial motive is the easiest to understand," Belyakov once wrote in his notebook.
That sentence became the first line of what would eventually develop into his precise, highly effective system for building teams.
It was also the first time Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov realized that once he was finished with big-time hockey, perhaps he might turn to science.
"Why not?" Belyakov smiled. "I'll formulate it, test it, and then pass it on to the young coaches. Let them develop it, add to it, build their own ideas on mine... But later."
He grinned and bent over the notebook again, realizing with some satisfaction that he had just moved to an entirely new level in his coaching work, one that had previously seemed completely beyond his reach.
He had joined the ranks of the innovators, the people who moved hockey forward and helped the game evolve. People who did not simply follow a template, but brought something of their own to the great game.
"The financial motive is the easiest to understand," Belyakov read again, then continued writing. For normal people, money is not an end in itself. It is a means. It is no secret that professional sports, and hockey in particular, pay very well. Those earnings allow players to provide a decent life for themselves and their families. Large contracts make players wealthy. They raise self-esteem, while the money a player earns also brings respect and gratitude from the people close to him for the life he can provide. Money is also an important tool that not only motivates a player but disciplines him. Once a hockey player begins earning a certain amount, he no longer wants to fall below that level. He does everything possible to remain there at the very least, and preferably to move higher, sign a larger contract, and secure better terms. That translates into a professional attitude toward the job and strict discipline both on the ice and away from it. The first million-dollar player contracts appeared in Russian hockey in the mid-1990s. Today there are players in our league earning three, four million dollars a year and more, plus playoff bonuses approaching another million if the team wins the championship. Naturally, numbers like that on a payroll can turn the heads of players and their agents. This semi-public information also motivates players who want to improve their skills and, accordingly, increase their earnings.
"Money is an extremely powerful motivation for players in practically every category because an athlete's career is short, and any practice, never mind a game, can be the last of his career. That's hockey. For that reason, the financial motive can be considered dominant, particularly for older players and established professionals. In modern Russian hockey, large salaries are both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because players with the proper level of skill and commitment can earn a decent life through their work. A curse because enormous earnings can go to the heads of hockey players with a primitive view of the world, and unfortunately there are plenty of them. Their perception of their own greatness, their place in hockey and in 'history,' and their assessment of their own abilities can become badly distorted, making a coach's job much more difficult.
"Unfortunately, Russia was a poor country for many years, and developing a mentality with a healthy attitude toward money, work, and professionalism will take decades. Most likely four or five generations of players will have to change. Coaches need to know that, understand it, and take it into account.
"The worst thing for a coach," Belyakov was convinced, "is when a solid player starts living off his contract. He signs a big deal and stops playing. Stops performing at the level for which the club recruited and signed him.
"Some of the country's wealthy clubs, however, have learned to deal with this problem very effectively."
Belyakov knew two elite clubs and, accordingly, two systems that worked virtually without fail, systems capable of bringing even the cockiest, biggest-name players with astronomical salaries back to their senses. He could hardly leave them out of his notebook.
"Although both teams have always been filled with the brightest stars and the largest contracts, for many years both clubs have remained leaders of Russian hockey, competing for medals season after season. Nobody on those teams simply sits on his salary or gets money for nothing. Everybody goes out and battles from the opening faceoff to the final horn. In one of the clubs, for example, players receive a fixed and relatively modest amount during the regular season. If the team performs well in the playoffs and accomplishes the goal set for the season, all the bonuses, incentives, and enormous sums stipulated in their contracts are paid. If the goal is not accomplished, there are no enormous earnings. It is hardly surprising that on this famous team, the players approach every game as if it were the last game of their lives. From the newest player to the biggest star, everyone is united by one idea because everyone's well-being is at stake.
"Human beings are built this way, at least psychologists say they are. A person may do something carelessly for himself, but doing a poor job for somebody else and then refusing to fix it is much harder. It's embarrassing. What will people think? That is why collective and individual responsibility for the result work so reliably.
"Another equally famous club chose a different approach. There are no enormous end-of-season payouts. Instead, every player's contract clearly specifies how many games he must play, how many goals he must score, how many assists and points he must produce, what his plus-minus rating should be, and where the team must finish in both the regular season and the playoffs. In other words, compensation is performance-based, which provides another motive and incentive for a professional attitude toward the job. Everyone has to be focused on results. Once that happens, the coach only has to direct all that enormous energy properly and rein it in when necessary.
"There is one subtle point in a performance-based system that must never be overlooked. The system of fines and penalties must be spelled out very clearly. Under no circumstances should money guaranteed in a player's contract simply be taken away. That badly demoralizes players and can cause open conflict between the team and management, drawing in agents and journalists and sometimes ending in lawsuits."
Belyakov had never personally found himself in that situation, but during his long life in hockey he had seen plenty of examples.
That was why he believed the system of penalties had to be explained clearly when the contract was signed, so there would be no disagreements, misunderstandings, or conflicts during the season. Every financial detail had to be discussed, understood, and put in writing before the contract was signed. Belyakov liked both systems. At different points in his career he had coached those wealthy clubs himself and had seen how effective both approaches could be.
Still, he preferred to work differently. The old-fashioned way. On trust, on a man's word, and on a man's actions. Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov had grown up and become a man in the Soviet era, when hockey was shaped by the traditions of great coaches such as Tarasov, Chernyshev, Kulagin, Bobrov, and Tikhonov.
Their basic principle was simple: die if you have to, but get it done. Don't let people down. Letting down your teammates or your team was about as low as a man could sink, whether he acted like a cheap bastard on the ice or away from it. You answered for what you did. The collective, the team, hockey itself came first. Everything else came afterward. Decency and mastery. That was what legendary Soviet hockey had been built on, and Belyakov was a product of that hockey. He took his hat off to masters, those God-kissed talents, natural goal scorers, players with a killer instinct who could score in any game and any league and almost never left the ice without a goal, sometimes several. He worshipped players like that, but only when they were well brought up, decent men who kept their word and remained loyal to their team and to hockey. Belyakov simply did not deal with problem players, however talented they might be. A difficult personality could become a problem for the entire team. So Belyakov did not invite players into his hockey squads if he believed they might let him down and wreck the whole enterprise. That, too, was part of his system. Every coach has strengths that allow him to succeed. Some are excellent psychologists. They understand people, motivate them, inspire them, fire them up, and lead them out of the trenches again and again. Some are outstanding tacticians and strategists, able to make quick adjustments during a game or give every five-man unit its own assignment and tactical plan for a particular opponent. Some are excellent teachers and planners who make the training process interesting enough that players willingly work themselves into the ground. Others have an instinctive sense of their team's condition and know how to balance rest and training so that the team arrives at games in optimal physical shape: fresh, rested, neither exhausted nor overloaded. Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov could do all of those things too. Perhaps not better than everyone else, but certainly well enough.
His greatest talent lay elsewhere. He had an instinct for people. Belyakov could read players. Give him twenty young hockey players at a tryout, and he could point to one or two and tell you exactly which ones would make it.
"Those two will become real players. The rest should think about giving up hockey."
And he would keep those boys, and within a couple of years they would grow into leading roles on his team.
Or he could take established players everyone already knew and combine them into forward lines or defense pairs in such a way that they suddenly transformed and produced the best seasons of their careers under Belyakov. Whenever anyone asked him how he did it, he laughed it off.
"How do you explain it? Pure luck."
In reality, Belyakov had his own vision and understanding of which players could work together to produce hockey that was exciting, powerful, daring, and productive, and which ones could not.
Some coaches run their teams and manage games almost entirely by intuition. They react to indirect signs, tiny details, casual remarks from players on the bench, and other seemingly insignificant things that make sense only to them. Belyakov was an expert at that. Intuition and instinct were his guiding stars in hockey. He could always hear or see the useful grain of truth in something one of his players said or did. For example, an exhausted veteran center might be swearing at a frightened young defenseman:
"Can't you see that while you're carrying the puck around, they're sorting us out and closing us down? You can't do it fast enough yet. Quit showing off. Dump it in and we'll go grind them down in there. When you grow up and learn, we'll play the passing game. For now, keep it simple. Win the puck, give it to the nearest guy or dump it into their zone, then go seal the boards. You can't throw passes into traffic and battles. Can't you see how tight they're playing us? We barely get the puck and lose it again. The point of hockey is to score goals, not spend the whole game fighting to get the puck back because we keep giving it away."
Belyakov knew the young defenseman was talented but still raw. More important at that moment, though, he immediately understood what the veteran forward was saying.
The game plan had been to defend first and catch the opponent on counterattacks, but again and again they were losing the puck in the neutral zone. Their attacks died before they developed, forcing everyone to retreat and defend all over again. The third and fourth units suffered most. The first two could enter the offensive zone and establish possession. The third and fourth crossed the opponent's blue line cleanly on perhaps one or two attacks out of six.
"He's right," Belyakov realized. "They're not just shutting down this unit. They're shutting down all of us. They're playing too tight and giving us no space. We're moving from defense to offense too slowly. We're trying to play safer and establish possession in their zone, but they're swallowing us before we can even receive the puck. Everybody has to do everything faster." "All right, boys," Belyakov ordered immediately. "We're playing aggressive now. Dump it in and grind them down. Two men hard on the forecheck. No more sitting back!"
Within a couple of shifts, the team would transform and blow the opponent apart.
All because Belyakov paid attention to what he called the "signs of fate."
Belyakov not only had a fine feel for players and their best hockey qualities. He had just as fine a feel for hockey players as human beings. Some understood nothing but profanity, and even that went in one ear and out the other. Others couldn't merely be yelled at, they couldn't even be stared at too hard, or during a game they would close up and turn into shadows instead of reckless warriors. With some players you could joke and talk about life. Others mistook that kind of relationship for overfamiliarity, decided everything between them and the coach was cozy, expected special treatment, and later suffered a harsh disappointment. With those players, a coach had to maintain an obvious distance. Sometimes a private conversation in the coaches' room was enough. Other times the conversation had to happen in front of the entire locker room, in a way that made the player feel the pressure of the whole team. Some players could be trusted in the most critical moments of a game. Others were useful mainly for "keeping the conversation going." Pyotr Ivanovich moved through all of this like a fish through water. Nobody had taught him. He had been born with it. Everyone has a talent. That was Bely's. A lot can happen over the course of a season, and some things happen that nobody ever wants to remember afterward. People are people. Every group has friction, incidents, and trouble. Especially a hockey team, a room filled entirely with confident men, warriors and fighters to the bone. Belyakov could close his eyes to certain things or let them slide. He could sharpen other situations or, on the contrary, deliberately cool them down. But in general, the men he called under his banner were spirited, predatory, unbreakable, honest players. And he treated them honestly in return. Once, a young but extremely talented player named Alexander Zybin showed up for evening practice drunk. Not falling-down drunk, but he had definitely been drinking. For an offense like that, Belyakov was supposed to dock the young talent a third of his salary.
He told the player exactly that and suspended him from practice. The next morning the kid came running in, pale, eyes lowered, apologizing.
"Pyotr Ivanovich, I'm guilty. It won't happen again. My friend just got back from the army and I did something stupid. Take my whole salary if you want, just let me back on the ice. We've got a game in two days. I need to prepare. I don't want to let the team down. Or you. Let me practice with everybody."
"Zyba, I've already told you. You're suspended from practice. You're free to go," Belyakov cut him off.
But he appreciated the kid's impulse and his attitude.
On game day, Belyakov summoned the offender to the coaches' room.
"Sanya, have you done anything these last couple of days?" "Yeah. Ran cross-country and worked out at the gym near my house."
"Good. Here's the deal. You're playing tonight. Score two and I'll forgive you. You keep the money too."
"Thank you!" the youngster said, lighting up. "Can I go?"
"You can. But if anything like this ever happens again, I'll throw you off this team so fast your head will spin. You know me."
"I know. I understand. It won't happen again. I swear."
"Don't swear," Belyakov said, softening. "Go score."
Zyba didn't score two.
He scored one, added an assist, and tried very, very hard to get the second. Not because of the money. He wanted his good name back. And his coach's respect. Belyakov was a hard man, but he was fair.
Pyotr Ivanovich saw the young forward's effort, drew his conclusions, and praised him after the game.
"Zyba, good job. You created good chances and scored an important goal. That's how you play. You always have to step onto the ice wanting it."
Then Belyakov looked directly into his player's eyes.
"As for the money, I forgive you. The deal was two goals, but I'm satisfied with a goal and an assist. And with the effort."
He smiled.
"Not a word about this in the locker room." "I understand. Thank you!" Sasha Zybin beamed.
From that moment on, he would have gone through fire and water for Belyakov. And Belyakov knew it. Those were the methods Belyakov preferred. Money was money, but decency, keeping your word, and devotion to the game were the most important things in hockey. Hockey was like war. A hard man's business, with no place for weaklings or cowards. And no place for petty, rotten people either. You could play hockey and lead a team only standing at full height, visor open, head held high.
That was why Belyakov did not reinvent the wheel or devise fashionable new contract systems. He simply recruited players he knew and trusted. When there was a misunderstanding, he tried to straighten the player out. If they could not find common ground, he parted ways without drama. Belyakov had no untouchables. That was one of his rules. Another was that whatever the contract promised, the player had to receive. Everything had to be honest and clear.
"A player has to know nobody is going to reach into his pocket. Then he won't be thinking about whether they'll pay him or cheat him. He'll think about hockey. How to play better. How to score. How to help the team more. Hockey players play for money. Never forget that."
In Belyakov's system, the second most important motive after money was career advancement.
"The second motive flows naturally from the first," he once wrote in the same notebook. "The brighter you play, the more you progress and grow as a player, the more you earn.
"Career advancement means making the senior team's regular lineup, establishing yourself there, making the national team, winning a World Championship or the Olympics, and going to the NHL.
"This motive dominates among young players. Early on, a motive such as money, for example, may not interest them at all. Their goal is to make a name for themselves, gain experience, establish themselves in hockey, and become masters. Career advancement remains important for every other category of player as well. Established professionals simply have different final goals: a richer club, a club capable of winning a championship, the national team, the NHL.
"Unfortunately, Russia is still a raw-material appendage to the stronger world powers. The same thing happens in our hockey. Russia is a donor and supplier of talent to the NHL. Even though wealthy clubs have appeared in Russia too, everyone still dreams of the National Hockey League. And not only because of the money. The NHL brings together the best players on the planet, and if you never test yourself there, you never say your most important word in hockey. Unfortunately, our players often fight to make the national team not to defend the honor of the country, but to get noticed and written down in the notebooks of scouts from North America. The NHL question will remain relevant in Russia until the United States and Russia reach comparable levels of economic development and stability. That will not happen soon, which means career advancement will remain an effective working tool for both players and coaches for a long time."
Belyakov believed career advancement was the foundation of sport. As long as a player wanted to grow and improve, he was useful.
Once he stopped developing, inertia, reflexes, and experience might carry him for another two, perhaps three seasons. After that, decline, collapse, and oblivion were inevitable. Belyakov always followed an old hockey saying: There are three stages in a player's career. First, he keeps quiet and does the work. Second, he talks and does the work.
Third, he talks and doesn't do the work. That was why it was so important for coaches to understand which stage of his career a player had reached, what he lived for, and what he still wanted from life and from sport.
When a player was still growing, and age had nothing to do with it, because at thirty you could still want to score in every game, set a new club record for hat tricks, or play an entire season without taking a penalty, there was always room for another feat in hockey.
If a player continued to grow, worked on himself, and set new goals, the coach had to help him, push him, and forgive certain mistakes. If he had already stopped, then the coach had to understand clearly whether that player brought more good or more harm.
"You don't have to do me any favors. There's a contract with your signature on it. You're supposed to play. If you don't want to, hammer a nail into the wall and hang your skates on it. Hockey should be played by people who want to play, not people who have to be begged."
Belyakov never had trouble finding words when he noticed a player beginning to fold, practicing only because he was forced to, playing without fire or desire, no longer celebrating victories or hurting after losses.
"There can't be indifferent people on this team! We forge our victories together, and we lose together too. We all have to develop and keep reaching for something because I promise you, our opponents are doing exactly that. We can't fall behind and give them a chance. Movement is life."
Belyakov liked to say this when an exhausted team was facing overtime, or when they had to turn around a game that was going badly and come back from two or three goals down.
"If we can do it here and now, we'll be able to do it next time too. Even in a situation this hard, there's an opportunity to grow a little and move forward. Come on, boys. Like when you were kids. Together. Nobody running around alone. Don't carry the puck forever, move it. Respect your teammates. Fight for each other. If we win, juice or soda is on me after the game!"
Smiles would break across the exhausted faces. The locker room would begin to murmur and come alive. Players encouraged one another, made noise, and then stepped onto the ice with calm, fighting confidence.
Belyakov had helped launch the careers of many young players. If a boy showed flashes of real skill, had character, and had been raised properly, Belyakov would watch him for a while, sit him down, and calmly make a deal.
"Here's what we'll do," Belyakov would begin. "I'll give you a chance to play. I'll give you a chance to establish yourself in the senior lineup. I'll personally make a call and help you get into the junior national-team picture, and if you're hardworking and stubborn enough, you'll go to the World Juniors and get drafted into the NHL, the thing all of you dream about. But in return, you work like a dog in practice, and in official games you play strictly within the assignment and the system. None of this 'I wanted to,' 'I thought it would be better.' If I say we enter the zone with a dump-in, we dump it in. If I say we're sitting back, we sit back. If I draw it up aggressive, you skate and pressure. No freelancing. If you and I agree now and I have no complaints about you, you'll grow into a hell of a player and become a rich man.
"If my terms don't work for you, we shake hands, say goodbye, never work together again, and keep watching each other on television."
Naturally, everyone agreed.
A properly constructed conversation, the prospect of career advancement, and a genuine chance at success worked without fail.
Belyakov spoke differently with older players. The terms of the deal changed. The tone and the essence did not.
"I let you go to the national team during the breaks. You come back without injuries and play the entire season without slumps. You pull your weight honestly, and you pull for the team."
If somebody wanted to renegotiate his contract and earn more, and his goals and assists justified the conversation, Belyakov again sat down face-to-face with the player and they came to an agreement. Belyakov loved players and was always happy to help them. He was happy when they grew and succeeded: when young players established themselves in the lineup and reached the World Championships; when older players matured and earned invitations to the senior national team; when the brightest signed NHL contracts and not only managed to hang on there, but truly made it. In every success, Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov saw the enormous labor of his hockey players and his own invisible, intangible involvement. Career advancement and opportunity were powerful motives for self-realization.
You simply had to choose the right horse, explain everything to it properly and, of course, bet on it. If you don't take a risk... you don't take a risk.
Ambition and pride were Belyakov's favorite strings in his motivational system, and he loved plucking them.
"Perhaps this is the main motive behind the development and formation of a professional athlete," Belyakov wrote in his notebook, underlining the statement and circling it heavily. Ambition and pride make players prove to themselves, their coaches, their teammates, and their opponents what they are worth. Sport is a competitive environment. Therefore, the desire to be the best and to be first is fundamental to sport. The nuance is that a coach must understand which players are introverts and which are extroverts. An introvert needs to prove something to himself. An extrovert needs to prove it to everyone else. Extroverts are simple. Good personal statistics, a good relationship with the coach, recognition from the press and the fans are enough. Introverts are more complicated. External, generally accepted achievements and successes do not concern them nearly as much. Their main measure is how they evaluate themselves. The team can win, but an introverted player, for example, may not have scored. The entire locker room will be in a wonderful mood and happily head off to dinner, while that player may remain depressed for several days, never mind the sleepless night after the game.
"A coach has to be especially attentive with this category of hockey player. Perhaps the team psychologist should spend more time with them, and if there is no psychologist, the coach himself should. Some works on psychology argue that absolutely everyone falls into one of two categories. Some people enjoy life as a process. Others enjoy achieving results. Ninety-nine point nine percent of athletes undoubtedly belong to the second category. Sport, as already noted, is a competitive environment, and achieving results, whether personal or team results, is the athlete's main task. Improving individual skill or personal statistics, winning medals, Cups, international tournaments, all of these are goals that make athletes work and improve.
"Ambition and pride are undoubtedly important levers for influencing players. A coach can play that delicate string indefinitely, provided he doesn't pull it too hard or too often. Every new sprint in practice, every shift in a game, every new match is a challenge the hockey player has to answer. That is why sport, and hockey in particular, attracts proud and extraordinarily ambitious people, hungry for victories and awards."
Back when he was young, just beginning to play center and taking his first steps in professional sport, Bely already knew that a game against a strong opponent always showed who was who. There were always hockey players who wanted to win but, even before the opening faceoff, had already convinced themselves there was no point tearing their guts out because they were going to lose anyway.
Those players did not last long in sport. Then there were the others, proud and ambitious players who tried to uphold their standard in any situation. The stronger the opponent, the more reliable and powerful they became.
There were few of them. But they were the most valuable.
"Why?" Belyakov once said candidly on a television talk show. "Because players of the first type will try hard and show their strength only against weak opponents. In a game they know they're going to win, they'll score as many goals as possible. They'll pile up points easily. But the team doesn't care whether it wins 2-0 or 9-0. A win is a win.
"A player with the second kind of psychology may not score a single goal in an easy game, but against a strong opponent he'll rise to the level, get angry, and refuse to give an inch. In that case, the team wins, not just the individual player. Of course, if there are too many weak-willed guys in the lineup, it's hard to drag a game out. So the effectiveness of the group depends both on each individual's effort and on the players as a whole. In other words, a team has to be a team. Ideally, a coach should have one, or better yet two, five-man units of ambitious, proud fighters with positive motivation. A leadership unit. Hard games happen. But when a team has a backbone, the other players naturally rise toward it. When things get hot on the ice and somebody is fighting desperately for the puck, the others usually don't leave the battle either. The reflex kicks in: our guys need support. What makes us any worse?
"Not being worse than the others, but being better. That's what drives the ambitious and the proud."
Belyakov always encouraged healthy ambition in his players. He approved when they fought to make national teams and never stood in the way of their leaving for international tournaments, even though as a club coach he had every reason to forbid it. Players could come back injured, fall out of the team's rhythm for a long time, and miss a pile of games. And naturally, the players invited to national teams were the very best, the club's leaders. There were seasons when Belyakov's team collapsed through entire stretches, losing five, seven, even nine games in a row because the national-team players could not help the club that paid them very substantial salaries. Sometimes every foreign player on Belyakov's roster left for Euro Hockey Tour events: Swedes, Finns, Czechs, all the imports, plus two or three Russian players. The team could barely hold a proper practice. Belyakov had to bring youngsters up from the farm club and reshuffle every five-man unit. Then, when the national-team players returned half beaten to pieces, practically all those youngsters had to dress for games.
The club owners and executives hated it. Not only did they have to continue paying enormous salaries to injured players in full, the team was losing and failing to collect points.
Belyakov's bosses would haul him in, terrorize him, threaten him. Bely remained unmoved.
"So we lost some points now. Came up short. You count the chickens in the fall. These guys will be playing at a completely different level in the playoffs in spring. Any national-team call-up, junior or senior, is a qualitative leap forward for a player. It's growth. Development. And while the leaders are away, we're letting our young guys smell some gunpowder.
"So I've always released players to the national teams, and I always will. If you don't like it, fire me."
Those trips to the carpet were always loud and emotional, but they never went beyond raised voices. And the players did not come back badly injured every time.
Tired, yes. Seriously injured, rarely. Belyakov's players valued and respected him greatly for taking that position. Bely had played for the national team himself and knew how much it meant to any player. So he stood like a wall for his athletes, supported their healthy ambitions however he could, and kept feeding their pride.
Whatever it took for the cause. Over his long hockey life, Belyakov had seen a great many talents. He had played with them, coached them, and always admired their unconventional decisions on the ice, their subtle moves that sometimes made sense only to them, their feel for the game and scoring instinct, their steady mastery, their ability simply by being on the ice to fill teammates with confidence and opponents with dread. He marveled at the magic and beauty of their goals. Those players were not afraid to take risks and score with swagger, with showmanship, with almost excessive elegance at the hardest, most decisive moments of a game. Another man's hands would shake and his knees would buckle under the responsibility.
These men elegantly, almost artistically, lightly and playfully hammered home a game-changing goal or buried the winning shootout attempt. A lot of people thought everything came easily to players that talented. It did. They were chosen. Chosen by this great game. But they still had to run cross-country, sweat under the weights, work in their own zone, block shots with their bodies, and fight until they bled just like everyone else. Yes, hockey was first and foremost a game, with room for ingenuity, artistry, improvisation, and the ability to be in the right place at the right time. But it was also brutal labor.
Work beyond the limits of human endurance. Talent alone would not carry you. Belyakov had a clear formula for working with those God-kissed players, those hockey geniuses.
The main thing was not to get in their way.
For bright, unconventional, gifted hockey players, the most important motive was enjoyment of the game. Belyakov wrote that section of his notebook in a matter of minutes, almost as if somebody were dictating it to him. He had formulated the idea long before, back when he was still a player. More than that, Pyotr Ivanovich believed every successful person, whether in medicine, nuclear physics, or poetry, relied first and foremost on the same motive. You could not devote enormous amounts of time, all your talents and abilities, to something you did not love. More than once Belyakov caught himself thinking that a coach's bread was hard-earned and, at times, almost unbearable. He had made enough money to live on long ago. He could have stepped off this train years earlier. But the work brought him so much joy, happiness, and pleasure. It gave meaning to his life and constantly made him strive toward something new. He did not love it for the money. For him, hockey was not a job. It was a way of life. The notebooks and records Belyakov had begun keeping when he was still a fairly young man were part of that life too. Back then he had not known he would become a coach. Nobody had forced him to record and systematize his knowledge and observations. Nobody had promised him a larger contract for doing it. He had started for himself. To understand this great game more deeply.
So when his system finally reached the section titled Enjoyment of the Game, he wrote with no less enjoyment:
"Doing what you love and getting paid for it too. What could be better? There is a large category of players who, just as they did in childhood, get pleasure from hockey first and foremost. They do not treat hockey as work. They treat it as their favorite game. That does not mean they approach their responsibilities on the ice unprofessionally or unseriously. They simply enjoy both the process and a job well done. Nor does it mean they are uninterested in money or career advancement. One does not interfere with the other. A successful play, a goal, a subtle, clever scoring pass, or a victory gives them positive emotions, renewed strength, and a positive attitude toward life."
One offseason, Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov, an Honored Coach of Russia, was asked to give an open lecture to students in the hockey department of a sports academy's coaching faculty. Belyakov gladly agreed. At the end he answered every question from his future colleagues and, when he had almost made it out of the hall under applause, journalists approached him. One of the questions concerned motivation, which Belyakov had briefly mentioned during the lecture.
"What drives people who already have everything? Money, fame, recognition, and most importantly, everything works for them on the ice? What drives players with no real weaknesses, players who can skate, shoot, beat defenders, impose themselves physically and win battles, score and set up goals? Stars, in other words. How do you make stars work? Or how do you reach an agreement with them so they play brilliantly every night?"
Belyakov smiled.
"You're asking a question that would take another lecture to answer."
"But still?"
"If you want the short version, I'll put it this way: I don't force anybody and I don't persuade anybody. Players have a job with the club, and they do it. If they don't, we part ways.
"But even the most decent, honest, hardworking hockey player can't remain at the peak of his game and physical condition all the time. That's part of the coach's job: deciding who dresses for a game and how the team prepares for it."
"Those are generalities. Give us something specific. Just one example. You were telling it so well... What actually drives wealthy players? How do you make stars work?" the journalist persisted. You probably won't understand, but I'll try. Enjoyment of the game.
"That's what drives them." "And that's all?" "Isn't that enough?" "Can you explain?"
Fortunately for Belyakov, other questions began coming at him. He answered them calmly, but the journalist's question about stars gave him a new idea.
On the way home, he thought it through in detail, formulated it, and wrote:
"Stars aren't the only players who enjoy the game.
"Any young boy who makes the game roster and pulls on his club's jersey for the first time feels no less joy than an established star does after scoring a beautiful goal. Players who get no enjoyment from the game do not play hockey, because no amount of money can make a person endure the inhuman loads hockey players go through during a game or absorb in practice. No amount of money can make a person tolerate the nomadic life of a professional player and the constant separation from loved ones, half a life spent away from home. No amount of money can make a person calmly endure severe injuries again and again: broken bones, torn ligaments, concussions. None of that is possible if the hockey player cannot play well and gets no pleasure from playing hockey. Every successful player necessarily possesses this element of motivation: enjoyment of the game.
"Those who are only beginning their path inevitably strive to reach the point where hockey gives them pleasure, and one of the coach's important jobs is to help a player experience that pleasure. Because hockey can be played with excitement and fire, or it can be worked at like hard labor.
"For a coach, every player is a tool. To achieve the best result for the team, the coach has to use each player's strongest qualities rather than retrain everyone and cut them all to the same pattern. If a player is allowed to play the way he wants and knows how, and if it works, his productivity is one hundred percent or higher. If a player is exhausted, insecure, doing everything because he is forced to, unhappy with his linemates, his ice time, and everything else, his effectiveness is no more than forty percent. That is why you need real players with a large arsenal of abilities, and then you need to create the conditions that allow them to use those abilities and enjoy the game and the result. When they do, the coach, club management, and fans will enjoy it with them.
"It is foolish to use a scoring forward, a natural goal scorer, only on the penalty kill or force him to play exclusively in his own zone. If a skilled player can score and knows how to score, you can build an entire five-man unit around him: two impenetrable, reliable defensemen with a good first pass; an intelligent center who can move the puck to him with his first touch; and another supporting forward who won't try to pull the blanket over himself, won't shy away from the dirty work, and will gladly play to the leader. Everything is solid. Everyone has his own job. Every role is defined. Everyone is involved, and the result will come. And everyone will have a hell of a good time doing it."
Belyakov reread what he had written, was satisfied, turned several pages, and looked at the section he had once written about ego.
Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov did not like selfish people. Not puck hogs who refused to pass and could ruin any scoring chance. Not show-offs who, admiring themselves, could carry the puck alone the length of the ice, deke through teammates and opponents alike, shoot wide, then stroll back toward their own zone pretending to defend. He disliked selfish people who placed their own interests above the interests of the team. Belyakov simply did not deal with people like that. But ego as a motive for achieving results in sport was something he respected.
"All players are egoists," he began reading. "And ego in sport is one of the most important driving forces on the road to success. More than that, sport may be the only place where ego is a legitimate form of human relations, because everybody wants to be the best and finish first, and there is only one gold medal."
Belyakov smiled.
"I really laid that on thick," he said aloud, and kept reading. The more egoists on a team, the better the team's chances of winning. The nuance is that the coach must unite all those egoists around one idea and direct all that destructive energy where it needs to go.
"Young players, young egoists, are fighting their way into the lineup, and that's excellent. They work. They prove themselves. Even in practice they try not to lose a single sprint or a single set under the weights to experienced, established professionals. They have come for those veterans' jobs and make no attempt to hide it, pushing both themselves and the veterans.
"Older egoists, the veterans, want to prove they're still plenty good enough, that they have hockey left in them and certainly aren't worse than the kids. More than that, they're ready to give the youngsters a hundred-point head start because they have experience, titles, and victories behind them.
"The stars and most talented players are part of the process too. They chase personal records and individual bonuses, and in every game they try to explain clearly, both to themselves and their teammates, exactly why they have the largest contracts. Like true egoists, they want the hockey Olympus all to themselves.
"Competition is wonderful. If the ego and desire of every player to be the best can be used intelligently for the good of the team and the common cause, there is no opponent capable of standing against talented egoists who are completely focused on success, hungry for victory, and unashamed of their hunger."
On one of Belyakov's teams there was a player named Nikita Chistyakov whose ego surpassed, outdid, and overshadowed everyone else's. It wasn't enough for him to beat opposing defensemen and make fools of them. It wasn't enough to make a beautiful pass or score. He played in such a way that he provoked both his own teammates and his opponents into actions that ultimately produced a goal.
Belyakov did not figure him out immediately. For a long time he could not understand why such a skilled forward could have so many chances in a game when he could shoot, yet refuse to do it. He played for his linemates. Passed. Fed them the puck. Drew two, sometimes three opponents toward himself, then threaded through them several times as though the purpose of hockey were not to score but to produce a beautiful deke. His five-man unit never simply blasted away from the blue line. They never charged the net headfirst. They never tried to score a "garbage" goal, a goal at any cost. They always played the puck until the sure chance appeared.
With passing and constant movement, opening space for one another, they simply tore the opposing defense to pieces and carried the puck into an empty net while the stands roared. Belyakov studied Chistyakov's statistics carefully and discovered that over every season he had played, the talented forward recorded five or sometimes six times as many assists as goals.
And yet in total points, the kid ranked among the top five, sometimes the top three, on every team he played for. Belyakov couldn't understand it. It broke the pattern. A goal was the crown of hockey. Everybody wanted to score. Yet this kid seemed to have some completely different view of the game.
Belyakov understood that he was dealing with something highly unusual and decided to talk to him.
"Chistyak, why don't you shoot? Every game you get clear scoring chances and you don't use them."
"Are we not scoring enough?" the player asked calmly. No, you score plenty. But you could score more. You personally could put one on the board every game. What, your name doesn't look good on the scoreboard? You shy or something?" Belyakov joked.
"Looks great," Chistyak said with a smile. "I just like playing hockey this way. When I've thought for myself, my teammates, and the opponent. Calculated everything. Taken everything into account. Made no mistakes anywhere..."
Belyakov had expected almost any answer except that one.
"So... what you're telling me," Belyakov said slowly as the idea began to dawn on him, "is that scoring a goal isn't nearly as interesting to you as being some kind of puppeteer, the power behind the throne, the guy who calculates everything for everybody and leads them like children to the decision you wanted them to make?"
"Bravo, Pyotr Ivanovich! That's exactly it."
"Interesting. I need to think about that. I won't keep you."
Chistyakov left. Belyakov remained impressed by that short conversation for a long time. He had never encountered anything like it before or since. The kid was certainly talented, but to show such open disrespect for hockey, for teammates and opponents, was almost beyond Belyakov's comprehension. Still, after thinking it through and calming down, he decided to leave everything as it was and not touch either Chistyak or his five-man unit.
"The line is producing. We're getting results. That's what matters most to the team. As for Chistyak being a little strange, we're all a little crazy."
A few days later, half joking, Belyakov returned to the conversation.
"Chisty, I figured you out. At first I thought you were a little... you know, not quite right in the head. Then it hit me. You're an egoist like the world has never seen. No, you're not an egoist. You're a tyrant. You need everything to happen your way." "Is that bad?" "I don't know. Life will tell us."
And life did tell them.
Every combination Chistyakov played in produced solid, productive hockey, and whenever Chistyak was available, Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov gladly invited him onto whatever team he happened to be coaching.
He would simply put two forwards with him and add a pair of defensemen who could also beat a man one-on-one, who did not just throw the puck away, who could hold onto it calmly and knew how to move it. The result was predictable. The stands roared whenever that five-man unit entered the zone, established possession, and, without rushing, methodically began doing what hockey people call rubbing the opponent's face in the ice. But Chistyakov's skilled unit never went out on the power play.
"You have to score on the power play. Period. And who knows what Chisty's got going through his head at any given moment? We'll experiment at even strength," Belyakov decided one day, and he stuck to that rule.
Once Belyakov had sorted out motivation, he carefully described which motives dominated among different groups of hockey players.
He came to understand quite clearly that, depending on a player's psychological type, education, social adaptation, worldview, and general picture of life, his motivation might rest on a single motive or on all five at once. Accordingly, the players on any professional hockey club could be divided into six groups. Belyakov started with the young players. Pyotr Ivanovich loved working with youth.
They already knew quite a lot if they had made it onto his roster, but young players still carried enormous reserves of unrealized potential. That potential might reveal itself once they filled out physically, became stronger, gained experience, matured, polished their skills, and became more resistant to stressful game situations.
A young player might grow into a magnificent professional, strong, powerful, and confident. Or he might not. There was only one step from junior hockey to the professional game, but some players never managed to take it. Belyakov had seen many wonderful transformations in his life and more than a few bitter disappointments. War was war. Still, Belyakov loved working with young hockey players. In his system, he placed players between sixteen and twenty in this category. These were promising young men, usually products of the club's own hockey schools, who stood out on the reserve team, were occasionally brought up to the senior squad, and were invited to the country's U18 and junior national teams.
From a financial standpoint, they had one major advantage: they were willing to play on minimum contracts.
At that stage, money did not matter nearly as much. Their motivation was built around career advancement. They needed to make a name for themselves, break into the professional club's regular lineup, stay there, make the junior national team, win the World Juniors, get drafted, make the senior national team, and go to the NHL. Belyakov believed young players should generally be signed for at least two years. During the first season, the player was usually being brought along and tested. If he showed real progress immediately, his financial terms could be reviewed for the second year. That was fair both to the player and to the club. If the player failed to meet expectations, the contract could be terminated after the first season, which in itself was a powerful source of motivation for young hockey players. In some cases, it made sense to sign young players to longer contracts, as long as five years. That allowed a player to develop in the farm club and gradually be integrated into the first team. Belyakov's experience showed that not every young hockey player was ready to shine in his first year or two. Some needed more time to gain experience, grow into themselves, and believe in their own ability. Some players had to be waited for. There were cases when a kid spent two or three seasons inside one club's system, was judged no longer promising and released, only to go somewhere else and suddenly become a real player. Young players were not only the club's reserve. They were an asset. Why develop talent for somebody else? Better to sign a long-term contract and work for the future without forcing the process. Belyakov preferred to take players with room to grow and never rushed their development.
"Every fruit ripens in its own time," Pyotr Ivanovich liked to say whenever management began getting nervous about why Belyakov sometimes had five or six players floating between the first and second teams.
The advantage of young players was that they gave themselves completely to the game and were ready to die on the ice for Belyakov because of the chances he had given them. But there were drawbacks too. Belyakov described them in detail in his notes:
"The disadvantage of young players is that because of their age, unstable psychology, excessive emotionality, and still-forming view of the world, a coach has to devote a great deal of time to them.
"You constantly have to motivate them almost like a psychologist, while also monitoring their training discipline, game discipline, and behavior away from the rink.
"There is one more subtle point that has to be taken into account when working with young and talented players.
"From an early age, agents promise them mountains of gold and unbelievable contracts. At the same time, they often convince the player that he should not think about the team and should work only for his personal statistics, because that makes it easier for the agent to sell him, promote him to national-team scouts, and get him drafted. Here the coach has to keep his finger on the pulse and watch the game discipline of talented young players very closely. If necessary, the bench can always be used as a warning. A player can even spend several games buried deep in the reserve. In my opinion, a team can carry five to seven young, promising players.
"A sizable group of young players creates internal competition among the young themselves for roster spots. That becomes one more source of motivation for promising hockey players and one more management tool in the coach's hands. The financial cost of carrying an entire group of young players for a season may equal the contract of one experienced veteran, sometimes only half of it. In recent years clubs have begun counting their money more carefully, and young players are receiving more and more attention. Surprisingly, it is often the wealthiest clubs that pay the most attention to young talent.
"The point is not only saving money and spending efficiently. The earlier a young star enters the club's orbit, the more value he can eventually bring. If the player never develops, the club loses little and can simply terminate the contract. Another important factor when selecting young players is to give preference to those who have already won something or earned medals at major tournaments. For example, a national championship in their age group, or a medal with the U18 or junior national team at a World Championship or another major international tournament.
"The psychology of a winner is not just a pretty phrase. It exists, and it is developed. It is developed through the furnace of tournaments. Through victories. A championship team does not necessarily dominate every opponent from the first day of a tournament to the last. Things are not always smooth. Some games become extremely dramatic, and winning them gives boys who will later become professional players invaluable experience. Sometimes the course of a game has to be reversed. Sometimes a player has to avoid panicking in a difficult situation, refuse to give up, endure pressure, stay out of the penalty box, control his emotions, and play for the team. Young players with substantial tournament experience go through all of these things, then analyze them afterward. Over time, those edges of experience will produce results when they are playing for a professional club. There is a reason people say winners and champions treat victory as something natural and difficulty as entertainment."
Whenever Belyakov chose players for his teams, he always preferred those who had already won something in their lives. It did not have to be gold. Silver or bronze at the international level counted for a great deal too. If he was considering European imports, Swedes, Finns, Czechs, Slovaks, Belyakov wanted them to have played for their national teams and to have won something with those teams.
If the candidates were Canadians or Americans, they had to be NHL players and Stanley Cup winners. If they were Russian players, experienced or young, he again wanted hockey players who had tasted victory in the Russian championship, played for the senior or junior national teams, and felt the pleasant weight of medals around their necks.
"I don't have time to teach them the winner's gene. They should come with it already," Belyakov would explain when turning down a player proposed by club management or an agent.
Naturally, people thought it was one more of Pyotr Ivanovich's eccentricities. He knew what he was doing. Because he always carried a large group of young players, Belyakov also involved older, experienced hockey players in their "education." In hockey circles, these veterans were known as dyadki, literally "uncles."
The dyadki were another category that always had a firm place in Belyakov's overall system for building a club team. In his notes, he described them this way:
"The dyadki are solid, dependable middle-level players. Veterans around thirty-three to thirty-five years old who are no longer particularly fast, but whose experience, skills, and understanding of hockey remain highly valuable to the team, especially to young players.
"Their contracts are no longer especially expensive either. Their best hockey years are already behind them, and what interests them most is stability.
"They prefer multi-year contracts. The deals may not be large, but they are guaranteed.
"Dyadki do not like changing teams late in their careers because they have already spent enough of their lives traveling. Family interests also begin to matter more to them than sporting ambition. By thirty, their older children are usually already in school. After years of moving from city to city, families do not want to keep changing schools, apartments, and homes. That is why consistency and stability move to the forefront for older players. The motives behind their behavior on and off the ice are these: they have long since satisfied most of their hockey ambitions. Career advancement no longer interests them. They are unlikely to be called to the national team and certainly are not going to the NHL. They no longer get the same simple enjoyment from hockey either, because at their age the game becomes hard work with extreme physical loads. Recovery takes longer and longer, and by thirty there are usually plenty of accumulated injuries. Therefore, financial stability becomes their main concern.
"Money is their dominant motive also because their hockey career is nearing its end, which means their familiar way of life is nearing its end as well. They have to prepare for the next stage. That is where many of the psychological problems a coach has to deal with begin. Players in this category usually have a very high level of self-respect and sometimes an inflated opinion of themselves. They have lived full hockey lives. Many played for national teams, European clubs, or in the NHL. They have seen a different life, a different culture and, no less important, different standards in human relationships. They became used to that and expect to be treated with great respect. That is normal. Coaches simply have to account for it. These players have not been poor for a long time, and in a financially difficult country such as Russia, their purchasing power can make them feel 'chosen.' From there come excessive pride and, as I have already noted, inflated self-esteem. Because of their age, many experienced players are suspicious and easily offended. They do not want to find themselves pushed out of hockey earlier than they had planned, so criticism or pressure can easily knock them into a disorganized state. As with young players, a coach often has to work with them individually. Older players already have one foot in life outside hockey. Because of that, they begin to fear injuries more. Their perception of risk becomes exaggerated. They no longer want to play through the impossible. They try to protect themselves and avoid unnecessary danger to their health. Taking all of this into account, a coach should motivate older players with several basic ideas. First, the man has lived a bright hockey life, and there is no point ruining the final impression of himself at the very end. In sport it is better to leave ten years too early than one day too late. One bad day can erase the memory of many earlier accomplishments. There is no point protecting yourself or being afraid of injuries now, because there is very little hockey left to live. On the contrary, a player should play fully and live it fully because every moment, every shift, every time he steps onto the ice is unique and very soon will never happen again. Later, everything he dreams about may still be there. But hockey won't. Training camps, practices, games. They will never come back. So enjoy hockey and drink in every moment, because everything in life comes to an end. And if you're going to leave, it's best to slam the door on the way out."
After explaining all that, a skilled coach could successfully play on a veteran's pride. All athletes were ambitious, proud, and protective of reputations that had been earned through sweat and blood over many years. The decline of a career was inevitable. Everybody understood that. Which was exactly why older hockey players feared the changes ahead. They were afraid of a different life. For their entire conscious existence they had lived inside a group of people exactly like themselves. Hockey players were treated almost like children.
They were woken up, fed, transported from practice to the team base, from the base to games, and everywhere else. For their entire adult lives, somebody had been thinking for them.
But they had to be told there was no reason to fear change. A coach had to tell them something like this:
"If you survived hockey and became somebody in it, believe me, you'll do even better among ordinary people."
Older players, like spoiled children, demanded more attention. But they were worth the effort. Age meant experience and authority, and in crucial moments a coach could lean on both, on the ice and away from it. A team might carry two or three dyadki. Just as with young players, when selecting veterans Belyakov preferred men who had won national club championships or international tournaments with the national team.
Their experience and authority could play an important role in shaping a team, bringing it together, and organizing its game. Respected veterans were also an important management tool in the hands of an intelligent coach. Older players had another quality that could be useful to young hockey players on both the first and second teams.
Because of simple physiology, veteran players could not remain at peak physical condition for long stretches or maintain optimal form indefinitely. Slumps were inevitable. Good coaches understood that perfectly. That was why dyadki needed more rest. They played roughly twenty percent fewer games. A veteran might practice and live according to the team's normal schedule while sitting out games.
In America, for example, there was a practice of sending older players down to farm teams. If a slump was inevitable and the player still needed to maintain his physical condition, why not send the veteran to the farm club for a period of "rehabilitation"? Belyakov once said exactly that in an interview.
"We definitely need to adopt the American experience. I think the idea itself is sound. But you shouldn't send too many veterans down to the farm. You have to be selective about who gets close to the young players and who doesn't. Everything should depend on the purpose. Young players really do learn faster when they have a living example of how to approach the game and follow the rules. In practice it's extremely useful when an experienced man playing on your line or in your defense pair tells you what would be better in a particular situation.
"Things sink in faster. You understand the essence sooner. But the older teammate has to deserve that trust. He should have at least some teaching ability, and most importantly, he has to want to share his experience. Remember Zapolsky? He retired from hockey, then six months later decided to come back. We gladly took him back, and before signing his contract he spent two months practicing with our farm club. According to the farm-team coaches, those were priceless two months for the young players on the second team. What they saw from Dima Zapolsky, the way he prepared for practices and the way he worked during them, forced many of those young guys to reconsider their attitude toward training. Zapolsky wanted to return to hockey. He had a goal. And he did everything possible to get back to his old level. The young players saw with their own eyes how a veteran who had fallen apart turned himself back into a machine and a team leader. His example inspired a lot of them. The man came back from nowhere and started playing again at a level anybody would envy. If you remember, that year our farm team finished first in the regular season and won the playoffs. And several players from that team joined me that same spring and have been playing for the senior team for years now. We shouldn't forget that the experience older players possess is priceless. Passing that experience on to younger players can also be considered part of the veteran's job, part of his contractual responsibility. The experience of established professionals is also a resource, and the coach and the club should know how to use it wisely."
When Belyakov brought dyadki into his teams, he chose former stars exclusively. Men who in their best years had built the reputations of their clubs and national teams. Players who had single-handedly dragged teams back into games, changed their course, and pulled them out of disasters.
Players whose speed, moves, and goals had brought entire arenas to their feet. With age they became a little slower, but they remained bright players, rock-solid professionals a coach could rely on in any situation, during games, in the locker room, and in everyday team life. Belyakov loved stars.
He always allowed them a little more than everyone else. In return, they paid him with results. Stars occupied an extremely important place in Belyakov's system.
"You can't build a team," Belyakov once said candidly to fellow coaches when a conversation over dinner turned to the inflated contracts of stars, "if that team keeps losing. To learn how to win, you need victories. Which means somebody has to know how to lead. You need leaders, authority figures, men who won't flinch when things get ugly and who can show everyone else how it's done. With goals. With bold, spectacular moves. With masterful one-on-one play. With uncompromising demands on themselves and on the opponent.
"Leaders, stars, spark plugs, alpha dogs, fat cats," Belyakov grinned. "Call them whatever you like. I prefer stars.
"Those guys can do everything in hockey. They can play subtly in attack and surprise you with their decisions, and at the same time work intelligently and tightly in their own zone. Reliable. Solid. No fly-bys. And if the situation on the ice demands it, they'll play hard. A team is built and hardened only through struggle. Through the ability to follow an assignment. Through the ability to endure. Through playing past 'I can't.' Through not panicking in a difficult situation. Through putting personal interests aside and playing for the team. Through knowing when to hold back and stay out of the penalty box, when to score, when to calm the team down or, on the contrary, fire it up. Through personal example. Through selfless hockey and commitment beyond the limit. There's a reason these men are called stars and are paid insane money. They're the backbone of the team. Its style and its face. The young players follow them. When things get hard on the ice, the others pick up their charge. It's almost impossible to overestimate their role. A star remains a star only as long as he shines every night."
That evening, at the banquet marking the end of the season, Belyakov for the first time publicly revealed part of his strategy. The strategy he used to build every club team he coached. By then, his notebook was already badly worn. This was what he had written there about stars:
"The name of this category speaks for itself.
"These are players with the highest level of individual skill, players with whom coaches generally have very few problems, assuming, of course, the coach has found common ground with the star. Stars do not need special motivation. They score and produce assists. They rescue the team in difficult moments and take responsibility for the game. Any player can have a brilliant night. A player can even have several brilliant games. Stars do it consistently, again and again. Their reserve of skill is so great that even in the most nervous moments of a game, they calmly and confidently show what they can do. Even when everything is at stake, they can still play boldly and beautifully. They possess an enormous arsenal of moves and execute them at tremendous speed. They skate beautifully. They score with wrist shots and slap shots, carry the puck around the goalie and into the net, practically shaking the goaltender out of his pants. These players have no obvious weaknesses and can do everything. People say they can score lying down, standing up, from one knee, or from the saddle. That is why they are generally satisfied with themselves and live in harmony with themselves. They are almost always in a good mood. They have large contracts. They are invited to the national team. They can leave for the NHL, although they do not always choose to go. The press loves them. The fans adore them. In other words, stars enjoy hockey and enjoy life. For a coach, these are the least troublesome players. Still, even stars need attention. Successful players are like actors. They need admiration. They need people to be happy about their success. And why not? If the guys are producing results, why not admire them? Yes, stars have big contracts. They're worth it. Ideally, a club should have two or three such players, perhaps even four. It depends on the concept behind the team and, naturally, the club's financial strength. Stars are the players who most directly influence the outcome of any game. A star is not simply a flashy scorer. A defenseman can be a star. A goalie can be a star. A star is charisma. A star is an image people believe in and follow. A star is both a foundation and an example for everyone else. A player's star status has to be supported by statistics, preferably year after year. A skater can be considered a star if he produces at least two points per game, whether those are two goals, two assists, or one of each. Among goaltenders, only a goalie who allows no more than one goal per game on average across the regular season and playoffs can truly be considered a star."
Belyakov's standards may have been excessive. But if the club's finances allowed it, he preferred to bring the best under his banner. Otherwise, how were you supposed to win? How were you supposed to take Cups and medals? There was a reason hockey people had always said, without any embarrassment, that some men carry the piano while others play it. Everyone had his job. Some hauled the ammunition. Others fired the shot.
But all of them mattered. Success depended on every contribution. Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov had seen plenty of stars in his time. Real ones. Solid ones. He had played with them, coached them, watched them grow from the beginning of their careers to the end. He had seen them on the ice and in everyday life. They were all different. Some he sincerely admired. Others disappointed him over time. But they all shared one thing. They were talented. And they worked.
After watching the careers and lives of stars for many years, Belyakov reached one conclusion he considered extremely important: Hard work alone cannot rewrite fate. Hard work multiplied by talent produces an extraordinary effect. Hard work multiplied by the absence of talent produces nothing. You can practice forever and work yourself into the ground, but the ability to play brilliant hockey and shine like a star is either given to you or it isn't. That comes from above. A good player sees what everyone else sees. A genius sees what only he can see. Despite Belyakov's special attitude toward stars, he never allowed anyone to become spoiled. And stars, even when a team had enough of them, were nowhere near all that was required for success. Winning required stable, dependable hockey. For that, a coach needed a reliable, well-trained team capable of executing an assignment, switching from one tactic to another at the coach's request when the opponent changed its approach, and calmly maintaining a high game pace without unnecessary discussion.
That required reliable players. The Reliable category was the largest and most important group in Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov's system. Belyakov classified as Reliable those hockey players between roughly twenty-three and twenty-eight who possessed a high level of individual skill.
"A coach has relatively few problems with them too," Belyakov wrote. They are skilled, well trained, disciplined, physically and functionally prepared, and psychologically stable. Their main motive is career advancement, followed by money and enjoyment of the game. Players at this level are sometimes brought into the national team. They may be planning to leave for the NHL.
"The most important thing for a coach is to reach an agreement with them from the start: when the national team calls, they will be released immediately so they can be seen and potentially leave for North America.
"In return, they produce results in club games. Players of this level should form the backbone of the team. There should be ten to twelve of them. Their responsibility is to produce at least one point per game through goals and assists. Reliable players can be considered those who finish a season with at least thirty to forty points."
In this category too, preference should be given to players who had already tasted medals in their careers. That was especially important now that the Russian championship included more playoff games, where any single game could be the last and decisive one, and a player had to show everything he had here and now. The best chance of doing that belonged to proven tournament fighters, men who had been through trouble more than once and come out winners.
Players in this category sometimes possessed another extremely valuable quality: against weak and average teams they played at their normal solid level, but against strong, wealthy clubs they became even more powerful and interesting.
It all came down to pride.
"Yes, the oligarch clubs haven't invited me yet. But I'm no worse and no weaker than the guys playing for them, and now I'll prove it to you."
And they did. They stepped onto the ice and played magnificent hockey. It was an extremely valuable quality, though Belyakov encountered it less often than he would have liked. More commonly, a middle-level player would score one or two against a weak team and disappear completely against a strong one.
That was why, within this category, Belyakov preferred proud and ambitious players who had come into hockey to accomplish something serious and who set serious goals for themselves. Age matters enormously in sport. It matters in hockey too, because hockey is speed first and everything else afterward. The accepted view was that the earlier a player developed and became a master, the better. A young man had more health, more strength, more fire. All true. Belyakov agreed with it, or at least did not argue. But he had his own view of the question, and that too was part of his system. He preferred his goalies, defensemen, and centers older and more experienced, so everything in the defensive end would be disciplined and dependable. His wingers he preferred younger, so the attack would have more speed, aggression, fire, and youthful nerve.
When foreign players became fashionable in the Russian championship, Belyakov did not fight the trend. Imports were exotic, which meant they were part of the show. So he gladly watched every foreign player proposed by agents and by the management of the clubs he coached. As a rule, in his own private draft Belyakov leaned toward players who had already been around. He preferred older foreign players, established professionals with a history behind them, men who had already played in Europe or North America. He looked at young foreign players with interest too, but patriotically preferred to take chances on Russian boys. Two or three seasons after foreign players began arriving in Russia in significant numbers, Belyakov wrote only a few paragraphs about imports in his notebook:
"The value of these players lies mainly in the fact that they cost less than Russian players of exactly the same skill level. There are usually few special problems with them, including motivation. They come here to earn money. They care only about their personal statistics and their pay. As a rule, foreign players are disciplined. The only thing a coach, or more precisely club management, should take special care of is shielding the player's family as much as possible from the everyday difficulties that inevitably arise in a foreign country with a different culture.
"The coaching staff may also need to pay attention to the player's social adaptation within the team.
"At first, perhaps one of the Russian players should look after him, invite him out to restaurants, movies, walks, family gatherings, and so on. It is important for a player from another culture to develop friendly relationships with as many players and club employees as possible. The number of imports on a team is regulated by league rules.
"On road trips, foreign players should room with different teammates each time. That helps them learn the language and adapt more quickly to the new team. A club should bring in imports who are at least Reliable-level players, and preferably stars. Otherwise there is little point, because Russia has plenty of its own skilled hockey players. The period when foreign players were interesting simply because they were exotic has passed. Teams need results now, which means expectations for imports should be higher. And here too it matters that a foreign player has already won something in his career, whether at the club level or with his national team.
"A true winner is someone who, having conquered one summit, is already looking toward the next."
With young players, dyadki, stars, Reliable players, and imports all accounted for in his roster-building system, Belyakov paid special attention to one final group.
Goalies.
Belyakov preferred Russian goalies. There was a reason people said a goalie was half the team. They were too valuable, and without diminishing the role of the other players, the outcome of a particular game and of an entire season often depended on them. Average players could score goals through structure and good team organization. A team could even survive without stars. Everyone knew that discipline could beat pure class.
But with a weak or average goalie, you could win nothing.
Only a strong goalie could bail a team out, carry it through bad stretches, and keep it alive in a game.
With a weak one, everything went in quickly, and after the third goal the team usually folded and stopped playing. For that reason, Belyakov had no doubts: the goalie had to be high-class and Russian, or at least Russian-speaking. A coach needed to understand exactly what condition his goalie was in, whether he was ready for this particular game, whether he had been overworked, whether he was exhausted, what he was thinking about, what he wanted. With a foreign goaltender, getting through to him and understanding what was going on in his head could be much harder. That was why Belyakov treated goalies with the same deliberate care he gave every other category in his system. Pyotr Ivanovich believed a coach was blessed if his goalie was a star. Only an exceptionally dependable goaltender could give a team a real chance to win medals. With an average goalie, hockey became a lottery. Belyakov wrote little about goalies, just as he had about imports, because too much seemed self-evident:
"A goalie, meaning primarily the starter, may belong to any of the categories listed above. Ideally, given today's reality, where one bad team performance can cost a coach his livelihood, the goaltender should be a star with a save percentage of ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent in a game. At that level, a team only needs one or two goals to win. Such a goalie may have the largest contract on the roster, and he is worth it. For that reason, the requirements for a goalie are primarily technical, though that certainly does not eliminate the coach's psychological work with him.
"More than that, everybody knows goalies are not skaters and have to be treated individually.
"Everything depends on the specific person's age, psychology, cultural and educational level, and the view of the world in which he lives."
While developing his system for building a club team, Belyakov became seriously interested in psychology. And once he had clearly defined every type and subtype of player, as well as the proportions in which they should appear on a successful team, his interest in the science of human behavior did not disappear. He took it further. Without textbooks this time, Pyotr Ivanovich discovered another interesting pattern. Whenever a general nervousness appeared in the team, shouting and swearing on the ice and in the locker room, heightened emotions in everyday life, on the plane, in restaurants, it was always connected with excessive workload. The moment conflicts, arguments, feuds, confrontations, and sometimes fights began appearing in the team, it meant one thing: The workload had to come down. Belyakov shared his observations and conclusions with a well-known psychiatrist.
The professor, genuinely surprised by the depth of Pyotr Ivanovich's observations, pointed out several other signs worth watching.
"Conflicts, my dear colleague," the professor said with a smile but without condescension. It was a conversation between two giants in their respective fields. "Conflicts are not the only sign of overload. Along with them, players may start developing colds, boils, skin irritation or itching. All of that points to a weakening immune system. The immune system cannot cope because the body does not have enough time to recover. At least, that was exactly what we saw when I worked with cosmonauts."
And sure enough, Belyakov began to notice that one rarely appeared without the other.
From then on, the moment he sensed nervousness in his players or saw scratching, rashes, pimples, or other signs on their skin, he immediately reduced the training load. Sometimes he gave them an extra day off. Sometimes, instead of practice, he took the entire team and their families to a swimming pool or water park.
Or he replaced the usual routine at the arena with a game on an outdoor rink, complete with jokes, hot tea, relay races, and ridiculous punishments for the losing side. One punishment might be for the losers to stand together and loudly sing some idiotic song for the entire neighborhood around the outdoor rink to hear while the winners laughed and shouted comments. Belyakov had no shortage of ideas like that.
Every hockey player had started on a neighborhood rink, after all. For all of them, outdoor hockey was a trip back to childhood, when they had loved hockey for no reason other than hockey itself. They had not played for money. They had not played for points. They had played because they loved it, because they were good at it, and because it made them happy. Belyakov wrote about this in his notebook:
"It is not difficult to overload a team, wear it down, and drive it into the ground. What is much harder is finding the balance between workload, recovery, and rest. If a team is exhausted and conflicts begin, it is often enough to reduce the workload and give the players one or two days with their families. The emotional atmosphere inside the team will improve dramatically. In this case, the conflicts are caused not so much by psychological factors as by physiological ones, though they certainly have a psychological component as well."
Belyakov's players loved his unconventional ideas. Everyone enjoyed suddenly being given a day off.
Or being taken, without warning, to a theater, not for an evening performance but to watch an afternoon rehearsal and step into a completely different world with its own intrigues, mechanisms, and rules. Belyakov also knew how to keep everything secret. The team would not learn about a trip or outing until the day it happened. Opponents and sports journalists frequently noticed that Belyakov's teams seemed to make no distinction between the first half of the season and the final stretch of the championship. His teams always played at high speed.
For all three periods they forced the battle, pressured the opponent, and kept coming. Sometimes they lost, but only on the scoreboard, never in skating or desire. It often looked as though the season had just begun for Belyakov's players. The team looked fresh. They played boldly and with energy. Everybody skated like express trains, and just as importantly, they came back just as fast on defense.
Malicious tongues whispered that Belyakov must have found some unique pharmacologist and that his success, his famous luck, came from very good doping. But in all his years as a coach, not one of Belyakov's players was ever caught using banned substances. Because Belyakov was a fierce opponent of doping in hockey. Journalists asked him about it more than once, and Belyakov always answered with a smile:
"Guys, I can understand doping in cross-country skiing, swimming, track and field, where strength and endurance decide everything. In hockey it's good to be strong. It's good to have endurance. It's good to skate fast."
Here Belyakov would pause.
"I know plenty of players who can skate fast. If only they knew where they were going, they'd be priceless."
Belyakov had told that joke many times and still could never keep himself from laughing.
"You have to understand, hockey is a very intelligent game. Speed and power alone won't win it.
"Now, if somebody invented a drug that could pump up the brain, I'd use that one gladly. Luck likes smart people."
Whenever he spoke to the press, Belyakov never missed a chance to slip in a joke or hint about his own famous luck. The press loved it. The fans enjoyed it. The players believed in it. So why not? Freshness, the correct selection of players, the right tactical plan for a game, a properly structured training process, the ability to inspire a team and at the right moment "raise it from the trenches," or slow it down, or force it to endure: all of those things were elements of success. Nobody could say which mattered most. Every component was necessary. And because every component was necessary, Belyakov treated all of them with heightened attention. The entire success of his coaching career rested on one basic conviction: Hockey players played the game, and they were the ones who determined the outcome.
The coach could only help them. That was why Belyakov always followed an old coaching saying:
"A team is like a horse. It should always be fed, rested, brushed, and cared for. Always full and content. And when it sees its owner, in my version, the coach, it should light up with happiness, snort, shift from foot to foot, and neigh with excitement because now the two of them are going to play. And at the end, the horse gets a sweet carrot."
Belyakov understood that the horse would be happy to see him only if nobody abused it, beat it, forced it to work beyond its limits, or kept it hungry. So with every team he coached, Belyakov rigidly followed one principle: The team had to arrive at games recovered and rested. Better to sacrifice something in training and give the players more sleep, more rest, more time at home, then let skill decide the game. A hockey player who wants to play and the exact same hockey player who does not want to play are two different people. Belyakov preferred the first kind.
That was why he selected them so carefully. He needed players without obvious weaknesses. Then he trained them intelligently so he would not overload them or drive them into the ground. And when he succeeded, practice became a pleasure and games became a celebration. If conflicts between players arose only from fatigue, every hockey coach in the world would be happy. But a coach was also a kind of father. When the children quarrel, he has to sort it out. Belyakov most often encountered conflict between young and older players. Between the young players and the dyadki in his system. The veterans understood whose jobs the young players were coming for. They knew the kids would eventually push them out of the lineup. It was only a matter of time.
Every coach, without exception, believes that a talented young player will improve, or more precisely add to his skill through new experience and greater physical strength once he fills out. A veteran, meanwhile, is already at his peak and fighting just to hold onto the level he has.
That is why, all else being equal, coaches always choose the younger player. It is inevitable. It is sport. Everybody understands it. But when new young players appear in a locker room, hockey players over thirty find it deeply irritating. Belyakov wrote this in his notebook:
"As I have said more than once, sport is a competitive environment. There is always competition within a team for a place in the lineup and, accordingly, for salary and bonuses. Sometimes that competition goes beyond purely sporting rivalry. In practice, established veterans often have complaints about young players who treat scrimmages and drills as if they were the most important game of their lives. Young players play hard, sometimes provocatively hard, because they need to show themselves, attract attention, and make the lineup.
"Naturally, experienced players don't like that. From there come tensions. At a minimum, the veterans respond with unnecessarily rough play toward the young players during the same scrimmages. At the maximum, it can end in shoving, punches, or fights in the shower or locker room after practice. These relationships between young and older players have existed since Soviet hockey. Back then, the idea was partly to harden character. A young player was supposed to go through everything: pressure from opponents and the need to survive among grown men. Today the same young-versus-old contradiction has transformed into a different kind of conflict, with a different motive. Professional sport is getting older. There is serious money in sport now, and everybody tries to play as long as possible, to hold onto hockey until the very end, because where else can a person earn that kind of money? And now the young players are coming from behind. They can knock a veteran out of the lineup, first cost him money, and eventually force him to retire. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future, which means conflict is inevitable. But there is a solution. Young players and dyadki should be selected in such a way that, for at least the next year or two, they are not direct competitors for the same roster spots."
On all of his teams, Belyakov preferred older, more experienced defensemen and younger forwards, fearless, fast, technically gifted boys. Because of that, he learned to prevent many conflicts before they started. More than that, he learned to use the arrival of young players as a management tool. Managing people is an art, and sometimes a coach has to be shrewd. For example, suppose Belyakov had five centers. He might call up another from the farm club and sign one more very respectable young center in the offseason. Immediately, all five regular centers would start wondering: Whose job is Bely planning to give these kids? They would think about it.
They would wake up. And suddenly the level of play would change. Everything would be at the limit because nobody wanted to sit in the press box. Players wanted to play hockey, not watch it. And Belyakov had never intended to replace anyone. He was satisfied with all of his centers.
He would send the younger one back to the farm club and keep the other as a strong reserve in case somebody went down. And, just as importantly, he kept the centers on all four lines from relaxing. Everybody stayed sharp. No conflicts. Belyakov remembered perfectly the day he himself was called up from the reserve team to the senior club. He was packing his gear in the locker room when his coach came over.
"Good job, Bely. I always knew you'd make it. Congratulations." "Thank you," young Petya Belyakov said, glowing.
He had imagined that moment hundreds of times. The call to the first team. New equipment. A real senior-team jersey with a real grown man's number.
"But don't get carried away. The senior locker room is a test of its own. You're going in there to take somebody's job, and nobody says they're going to hand it over. You understand what I mean?"
"I understand."
"The main thing is don't be afraid. In practice, do everything you can and then a little more. Try to be the best in every sprint and every drill.
"Play hard. No fly-bys. Finish through the body. Take initiative. Carry the play. Shoot from everywhere, but make sure the puck hits the net.
"Make them notice you. Otherwise you don't have a chance." "I know," Bely said calmly, continuing to pack his gear bag. "And don't get timid, Bely. The guy who gets scared is the guy who dies," the coach joked and held out his hand. "Good luck."
They shook firmly. Petya Belyakov threw the gear bag over his shoulder, picked up a bundle of sticks, and walked into adult professional hockey. It was far from easy. New coaches. New drills. An unfamiliar system. He had to play against older and stronger opponents. He had to fight for a place in the lineup both on the ice and inside his own locker room.
He had to make the team accept him.
The road was rough, but he made it through. Things became easier only when the veterans finally recognized a player in him and left him alone. They began calling him by name. They shook his hand. That took six months.
After that, everything began to flow naturally: practices, games, road trips. Some young players never managed to take that step into men's professional hockey. Surviving and establishing yourself among grown men was a test of its own. That was why, whenever Belyakov brought young players up, he watched them. He did not shelter them. He watched. How did they behave in the group? Was everything all right? Young players had always been tested and pushed around. Jokes, pranks, sometimes genuinely offensive ones. Belyakov never interfered and never took sides. He did not allow serious conflict, but if a player could not handle the pressure of the group and could not stand up for himself, Belyakov let him go. Nobody needed a weakling. Even if the fastest and most skilled player on the team had no character, in Belyakov's eyes he was not a player. Hockey was a man's game. A game of heroes, where courage always had a place. And weaklings were incapable of courage. Belyakov was a product of the Soviet school, which was why he could be so categorical. In Soviet hockey, everything rested on honor and character. And skill, of course. Once big money and enormous contracts entered the game, everything turned upside down. Players began arguing and feuding over money. In another situation, perhaps a coach could have ignored it. But hockey was a team sport, and winning required a fist, with everyone from the club administrator to the biggest star on the roster forming one whole.
One powerful iron fist. After several years of watching contract-related conflicts, Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov wrote the following in his notebook:
"No matter how hard club managers try to keep player contracts secret, it never works. Everybody inside a team eventually knows everything, and no Russian club has ever managed to enforce true corporate confidentiality. Information leaks according to the same pattern every time. Club presidents speak to one another. They speak to assistants and trusted people inside their clubs. They speak to agents. Agents speak among themselves and with players.
"Sometimes players on different teams are represented by the same agency. After negotiating favorable terms for one client, the agency tells its other clients about the deal to improve its own reputation in their eyes. Players talk among themselves. Somebody is friends with somebody. Somebody played with somebody years ago. One way or another, sooner or later everyone knows everything. That is why the details of any contract, even a coach's contract, can remain secret only for a limited time. Naturally, players with smaller contracts who score and produce more than their better-paid teammates begin to ask questions and feel resentment. Eventually that resentment becomes a subject of open discussion, and nothing healthy comes from that for the team. There is another delicate issue. Kickbacks. Everybody knows about them, and there is probably nothing new to say. Sometimes a player actually earns far less than the amount written into his contract. He might gladly explain to his teammates that he earns every penny he actually receives, but he cannot expose his agent, the club president, or the general manager who used his contract to pull money out of the club budget, or, to put it plainly, steal it. Conflicts over money will remain inevitable as long as Russian hockey is subsidized, as long as teams do not have real owners, real revenue, open budgets, and public payrolls like they do in the NHL. The task of any president or general manager of a Russian hockey club comes down to 'properly' spending the budget, taking enough money out of it for himself, and at the same time keeping the founders, sponsors, and team satisfied. If the club wins medals, nobody starts digging into whether signing a certain player made sense or why somebody had such an absurdly inflated salary. But if the money has been burned and nothing has been won, that is when things get interesting for the tabloid press.
"That is why all genuinely qualified, truly competent coaches in Russia work for wealthy clubs. Not because those clubs can offer them solid contracts, but because in wealthy clubs even the stealing is done on a wealthy scale. A real coach can turn even a team of one-legged players into a team that wins and gets results. And when results are there, when there are Cups and medals, nobody is interested in inflated contracts, kickbacks, or theft."
After writing that, Belyakov thought it would be a long time before he could show this section of his work to anyone or publish it anywhere. Those statements would raise far too many questions from far too many directions. So he did not cross anything out or change it. Instead, he wrote another version. The version, as he put it, "for the press":
"Arguments are inevitable when people play on the same line, score together, and one man's salary is ten times greater than the salaries of the entire five-man unit combined. And sometimes the fat cats settle into their contracts and stop playing. Stop playing at the level expected of them. Then the conflict can involve the entire team. The solution seems simple. First, hockey executives have to protect contract confidentiality.
"In Russia, in civilized companies, an employee can be fired within two hours simply for stating his salary out loud, with the reason entered into his employment record as a violation of corporate ethics. That is why nobody is surprised anymore that salaries are paid directly to bank cards and nobody asks anyone else about the terms of a contract.
"The assumption is simple: if a person accepted those terms, then he was satisfied with them. Teams should move toward the same principle. A contract should remain confidential. Professional corporate ethics should be enforced inside clubs. If a person accepted a contract, then the terms suited him. That makes life easier for coaches too. There are fewer arguments.
"If a player accepted the conditions offered, then he was satisfied. And if he was satisfied, then he should do his job instead of hiding behind the fact that somebody else makes more money and produces fewer points. In truth, this is not only a problem in sport. It is a problem of mentality. Russia has not yet produced a generation that never experienced poverty and collapse. From there comes a kind of servile psychology, with its heightened sense of 'fairness' and, quite often, simple envy. In the NHL all contracts are public. Everybody knows what everyone earns, and nobody is particularly disturbed by it. Russia is trying to come out of the shadows too, but it is doing so in the Russian way, which means arguments, omissions, and conflicts will remain for a long time. The root of the problem is simple: in the NHL people make money from hockey. In Russia people launder money through hockey, take kickbacks, and carve up budgets. And when people are stealing, who needs transparency?"
Belyakov remembered perfectly how his hometown club had given him an apartment when he was still a young player so he would not leave. They helped him buy a car. His salary was substantially higher than that of an average engineer. But every hockey player in every club in the Soviet championship lived under roughly similar conditions. Nobody obsessed over money. Everybody had enough. The highest form of recognition, the highest dream, was the national team. Every player dreamed of standing on the blue line beneath the red flag while the anthem of his country played. Capitalism changed everything. Now only young players dreamed about the national team, and even they often dreamed of it mainly as a chance to be noticed.
Established players went there almost as if serving an obligation, doing favors for everyone: the national-team coaches and the fans. Money. Everybody became interested in money. And for Belyakov, with his faith in people, decency, and human relationships, it sometimes became extremely difficult to unite teams around a single purpose because life had shown him that everybody's purpose was different. Everyone cared about the size of his contract, personal statistics, and the chance to renegotiate the next deal for a larger number. But Belyakov would not have been Belyakov, would not have been Lucky, if he had not found a way to extinguish conflicts and unite people.
The first time serious tension over money broke out on one of his teams, Belyakov became so angry and disappointed that he canceled practice and called a meeting right in the locker room.
"What the hell is wrong with you guys? Have you lost your minds? What are you even discussing? What are you arguing about?"
Belyakov was barely holding back the profanity as he tore into the team.
"You don't make enough money?"
He pointed at one player.
"Or you?"
His angry stare shot across the room.
"Then play better. Score two or three every game. Put up five assists. Then everybody will want you and you'll be choosing your club instead of grabbing the first offer that comes along.
"If you think you're good enough and still aren't getting paid enough, change agents. There are sharper guys out there, guys with connections and authority."
Belyakov gradually began to calm down.
"But I'll tell you this. Nobody pays big money for an empty shell. A big contract has to be backed by big-time skill and numbers, and you've got to produce at that level for five years. Two seasons at the very least."
He exhaled and continued in a quieter voice.
"If you signed the contract with your own hand, then you accepted the terms. After that, it doesn't matter what anybody else makes. Be men and stand behind your word. You signed it, now go to work. Nobody put a gun to your head. Prove you're worth more, and next time you sign, ask for more. That's it. I never want to hear another conversation about money in this locker room. Our grandfathers and fathers never would have beaten the Nazis if they'd thought the way you're thinking now. It's embarrassing, boys. We're all doing the same job, and you're carrying on like women arguing at a market."
Belyakov spat in disgust, walked into the coaches' room, and slammed the door. The problem did not disappear. But at least nobody discussed it openly in the locker room anymore. Later that evening, Belyakov analyzed what he had said in anger, sincerely and without preparation, and concluded that he had done the right thing. He had only failed to make the most important point. He delivered it the next morning before practice.
"Boys, I made some noise yesterday. Maybe I got a little too emotional in places, but I wasn't trying to insult anybody."
Belyakov looked around the room.
"And I didn't insult anybody. So I have nothing to apologize for. But yesterday I left out the most important word. Professionalism. We're all professionals here. Everybody has his job. Discussing another man's earnings is unprofessional. So that subject is closed and we move on. We have one goal: win every game. That's what we're paid for, not gossip and infighting. Any questions?"
Belyakov looked around the locker room again.
The team remained silent.
"Get ready for practice."
From that day forward, Belyakov took what he had said spontaneously, thought it through, turned it into a principle, and crushed any conflict over money the moment it appeared. More than that, he preferred not to deal with troublemakers, schemers, or chronically difficult players. If a player revealed himself to be one of those, Belyakov never worked with him again and never invited him onto another team.
"Better to unite around something good, something bigger than yourselves, instead of splitting apart over some stupidity. Hockey is a courageous sport.
"Like war, it shows immediately what a man is made of.
"Who has strength of spirit and who doesn't have the guts. So protect your name and your reputation. The hockey world isn't that big. Think before you start trouble inside a team and distract everybody from the work."
That was one of the pillars of Belyakov's authority. Decency. Professionalism. A common cause. Common goals.
And, of course, skill. Belyakov had trouble saying what mattered most to him: skill, professionalism, or decency. Ideally, he wanted all three qualities in his players. But preferably with a little more skill than anything else. One of Belyakov's strengths was that he separated a player's sporting life from his ordinary life. He preferred not to work with difficult players.
But when that was unavoidable, for example when he took over a team and a hockey player with demons in his head and a terrible personality was already under contract, he always tried to reach an agreement. If they could not reach one, Belyakov continued coaching the player calmly. He did not hound or smother the "black sheep." He treated him exactly like everyone else. As long as the player helped the team.
If the man did more harm than good in the locker room or on the ice, Belyakov parted ways with him. He gave club management an ultimatum, and the player left for another team.
"Boys," Belyakov would tell his players, "every complaint I have about you is about you as hockey players, not as human beings. I don't care who drinks, who snorts something, who gambles, who beats his wife, or who can't stay away from prostitutes. You can eat babies at night for all I care. What matters to me is that you come to practice ready to work and give me your maximum in games. I'm a coach, not a nanny and not your moral guardian. I want you to play better than anybody else. How you live and what habits you have are your business. I want to work with professionals who are ready to practice and play at the maximum.
"So when I criticize you, I'm criticizing hockey players, not judging you as individual human beings."
And in truth, Belyakov never divided hockey players into black and white. He had favorites. He never hid the fact that he took his hat off to talent. But in work, in games, and in difficult situations, he treated everyone evenly. In Soviet hockey, however, players had always been divided into those who played and scrapers. The scrapers were the boys who cleared snow with scrapers and shovels before practice and never made the lineup. They did not even dress as reserves. Back then many rinks were outdoors, so there was no point sitting on a bench in freezing weather just to watch. The scrapers always got the worst of it. All the dirty work was theirs.
They were the ones running errands. The players who actually dressed for games were allowed almost everything, on the ice and away from it. Belyakov had never been a scraper. But even as a boy, he had always felt sorry for the kids who arrived before everyone else, cleared the snow, and then spent the entire practice standing by the boards, collecting pucks and helping everyone else. They were good boys. They loved hockey too. They simply had not been given the gift to play this great game. And that was exactly why Belyakov never divided his own hockey players into first-class and second-class people. He considered that an important part of building and uniting a team, and he devoted considerable space to it in his notes:
"One of the most common mistakes made by coaches working with children's teams is dividing the roster into black and white, meaning favorites and everyone else. From the standpoint of pedagogy and psychology, this is extremely wrong. The same kind of division also appears fairly often on professional teams. The difference is that those are no longer children. They are grown men with stable psyches who can survive a season or two without a coach's love and affection, then move on to another team. In this section I want to focus on something slightly different.
"Professional hockey in Russia is gradually transforming from pure sport, the way it once was, into entertainment and moving toward show business. There is nothing wrong with that. The NHL, NBA, American football, and baseball all exist and prosper on exactly that foundation.
"Hockey games in Magnitogorsk, Omsk, St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Yaroslavl have long stopped being merely sporting events and become social occasions. As a result, star players have become full-fledged newsmakers and visible figures in the local press and on television, sometimes even on national channels.
"In Tatarstan, practically nobody knows the name of the first deputy president, but everyone knows the captain of Ak Bars. They know where he was born, which clubs he played for, and how many goals he scored last season. They also know the center on the first line, the line on which the captain plays, but far fewer people could tell you that center's biography or list his accomplishments. And that is despite the fact that the man is a genuine star in Kazan, and it is far from obvious who contributed more to Ak Bars winning the championship, the captain or his center. Yet everybody in Tatarstan and across Russia worships the captain. I am deliberately not naming names because I do not want to take sides. I am describing the situation only as an example. The Kazan captain really is an excellent man and a great player. Charming, smiling, talkative. It is completely understandable why every journalist, sports or society, wants to interview him. That remains true even though Ak Bars is famous throughout the league and the country for its entire first forward line, while nearly all the attention goes to the captain. That was exactly what led to the protest by the center on that first line when, shortly before the playoffs, he refused to continue playing with his usual linemates. Let them try without me, he thought. Let's see how well they do. Settling the conflict and returning the player to the first line required work from the coaches, the entire club management, and even people from the government of Tatarstan. Everyone understood perfectly well what that first line would look like without its star center. And this is not an isolated example, although it is a very revealing one. It simply happened to reach the sports pages and become public. Every team has problems in the relationship between Stars and Reliable players. Both groups help the club. But the fans give their love to the stars. The press gives its attention to the stars. Shareholders and club executives give their friendship and favor to the stars. Naturally, that eats at the Reliable players and creates resentment. The lesson is simple. Every NHL club has a media-relations department. One of its responsibilities is shaping public opinion and working with the press, fan clubs, and individual supporters. For many reasons, our club media departments reduce their entire job to preparing game programs before home games and organizing postgame press conferences.
"They do not truly participate in the life of the club because they are often kept away from the team. That means the head coach, even though it is not technically his job, has to make sure the media covers every worthy player. More than that, the media can become another important tool in a coach's work with the team. It is one thing to praise or criticize a player privately in the office. It is something very different when the same praise or criticism comes from a television screen or from the pages of a newspaper. Club media departments contain an enormous reserve of potential that can be used for the benefit of both club and team. Handled correctly, it can also reduce the risk of creating black and white players inside a roster."
Belyakov always put the team first. The team's interests always came before personal interests. He taught his players to think the same way.
"Boys, when you enter the arena, leave everything personal outside the door. Practice ends or the game ends, you go outside and return to your family, your children, your own business. Professionalism matters in everything. In your attitude toward the common cause and toward the common goal too. We're all different. We all have different problems.
"But since we've all ended up here together, we have to believe in the success of the common cause and contribute everything we can. In every game. Every shift. Every moment.
"Only an iron fist can break through a stone wall. Solid. Hardened. Without defects or weak spots."
Belyakov was not a man who loved beautiful speeches, long meetings, public floggings, or theatrical displays. He preferred speaking briefly and to the point. Everyone who had worked with him for more than a year knew his standards. They knew he could forgive a personal slight. But if someone showed contempt for the team, Bely never forgave that. And if he called a meeting and canceled practice, then something had truly happened that violated his central principle. Everything for the team. Everything for victory.
"The collective, the team, that's everything.
"You can't win a hockey game alone any more than you can win a war alone. Everybody has his job. Everyone matters where he stands. Success in a particular game, or across an entire championship, depends on everybody's contribution. So if someone wipes out everybody else's effort through uncertain decisions or openly toothless hockey, then he and I are not going the same way."
A united group was an important element of success in hockey. Belyakov knew perfectly well, however, that every club contained its own small coalitions. By age. By interests. By former teams.
And by all kinds of other things.
"If it doesn't hurt the work or damage the atmosphere, then for God's sake," Belyakov believed.
But if groups and factions appeared with open or hidden hostility between them, a coach had to fight it. One of a coach's responsibilities, Belyakov had read repeatedly in psychology books, was to prevent the team from fragmenting into coalitions and instead build a single collective.
There was no universal recipe. But there were certain techniques worth using, at least according to psychologists. Belyakov wrote this in the notebook, which by then was already substantial enough to resemble a doctoral dissertation:
"Psychology has a concept called correlation. Put simply, it means connections, relationships, or the degree to which people depend on one another.
"Success in any field, whether sport or business, depends on two things. First, there must be qualified personnel. Second, everybody has to live for and want the same thing, whether they are players, coaches, or support staff. When those two conditions exist, there is little room for cliques. Preventing them begins with the simplest things. Today almost every club turns over a large part of its roster every season. That is reality and has to be accepted.
"To prevent cliques and 'interest groups' from forming, players should room with different teammates during training camps and road trips.
"That helps people get to know each other faster and prevents them from becoming too tired of the same company. Foreign players should never be roomed together.
"They should be assigned different roommates, preferably Russian players, so they learn the language faster and adapt more actively to a new country, culture, and league. Young hockey players should not always room together either.
"On the contrary, they should regularly be assigned to different experienced players so the young men can absorb both hockey knowledge and ordinary life lessons through conversations and by watching the veterans. Sometimes, of course, there is value in putting the same defense pair together in one hotel room, or even members of the same forward line, so they can discuss game situations in their free time and agree on how they will handle different plays. But this should not be overused. A season is long and difficult. People already spend far too much time together on planes, trains, at arenas, and everywhere else. That has to be taken into account.
"Managing room assignments is particularly useful late in the season and during the playoffs, when players are already exhausted from travel and from constantly being around the same people. Some coaches believe players should room with whoever they want. Sometimes the staff does not interfere, and certain hockey players spend training camps and road trips with the same roommate for years. There is an advantage to that. People get used to each other and know what to expect. A roommate's habits and behavior stop irritating them because they have already adapted. Still, the coach should manage the process. Intelligent manipulation of room assignments can significantly improve the atmosphere inside a team and force separate coalitions, even if they already exist, to work toward a common purpose."
Belyakov recopied his notebook, by then a thick, battered volume, several times.
First because he carried it with him everywhere: training camps, games, road trips. Naturally, it became badly worn. Second because he was constantly revising every section of his system and every observation. He corrected things. Reworked them. Added new thoughts. Organized them. Hockey changed. Life changed. Which meant his knowledge and experience had to change with them. Otherwise the notebook would no longer have been a genuine working tool, and Belyakov would hardly have managed to survive so successfully for so many years in the most vulnerable job in professional hockey: head coach. And remain Lucky at the same time. Almost nobody knew exactly what was in the notebook. People saw Belyakov constantly writing something. Sometimes he would glance through it. Sometimes he would sit for a long time reading a section. A coach working. Thinking. Writing. Analyzing. Coaching was not just a whistle, shouting, and profanity. It was relentless work every second. A head coach was always at work because he wanted his team to win.
That meant preparing for practices. Preparing for games.
Studying opponents and their tactics and strengths. Developing himself. Constantly thinking about what else could be improved, what could be tightened, where there might still be a loose end or a weakness.
So his boys could step onto the ice and wipe the floor with any opponent. So nobody could ask why Belyakov's team had won that night instead of somebody else's. If anyone had truly known what was contained in yet another thick, battered notebook belonging to Pyotr Ivanovich, more than a few fellow coaches would have gladly sat somewhere quiet and read Lucky's observations and thoughts carefully. They would have turned the pages covered in his small handwriting. Studied game diagrams.
Training-load charts. Tables. Formulas. They would have borrowed priceless experience earned through suffering and preserved in that notebook. But Belyakov remained silent. For the time being he did not advertise what he was writing. He simply continued with great pleasure. That was the beauty of creative work. There was no limit to improvement. Nobody doubted that Belyakov was a creative man. His unconventional moves during games proved it. He could reshuffle the roster and go down to three five-man units, sometimes creating one composed only of centers and defensemen. He could change tactics three times during the same game, which spoke volumes about how disciplined and well trained his team was. Like a conductor, he could raise the tempo through short shifts or slow it down through icings, long setups before faceoffs, and other little tricks depending on the situation. He could calm the game. He could choke it dry. People could attribute Belyakov's success to luck all they wanted, but the hand of a master was obvious.
"Every game has its own drama," Belyakov once said at a postgame press conference. "The only question is whether events unfold spontaneously or the way you intended them to."
That set everything off. Journalists who understood hockey only superficially, which unfortunately meant most of them, seized on the remark and spread it everywhere. Belyakov had spoken sincerely, relying on decades of experience, but suddenly he was under heavy criticism. Bely had become full of himself. Bely had finally lost it.
How could anyone control chaos? Hockey was a tornado. A tsunami. Unrestrained energy. Try taming that. Belyakov was simply a lucky coach, they said. Things happened to fall his way. You could not control a force of nature, much less make it obey you. Naturally, Belyakov entered no public arguments. He defended nothing. Explained nothing. In Russia, everybody was an expert on politics, economics, and hockey. Why argue? If people wanted to attribute everything to luck, let them. He certainly was not going to explain that for more than fifty years he had barely put down a hockey stick, that every day he discovered something new, studied, struggled, spent sleepless nights searching for decisions that might move his team one milligram closer to victory and success.
Incidentally, Belyakov always had excellent relations with the press. He was easy to approach whenever that served the team.
As for criticism, he reacted the way a truly accomplished master reacts. He didn't.
"You can't stop a cruiser by swearing at it," was one of his favorite sayings as he smiled, crumpled a newspaper containing an unflattering piece about him or his team, and dropped it noisily into the trash.
Belyakov tried to be an innovator and creator in every aspect of hockey, not just during games. The game itself was simply the part everyone could see. People saw only the tip of the mass.
The bright tip of the iceberg in the sun. Bright, impressive, and only a tiny part of hockey life. The enormous universe called hockey remained behind the curtain, hidden from outsiders. Nobody could imagine how much hockey players trained. How much time they spent traveling and flying. How much stress they endured in dramatic games. How much exhausting work and iron will were hidden inside coaches' offices, locker rooms, weight rooms, and arenas. Hockey, like life, changed quickly. Equipment changed. Speed increased. Rules changed. Everything developed. Nothing stood still. To avoid getting lost in that race required total concentration every second and backbreaking work.
To lead the race, or at least remain among the top three, required the same work and concentration multiplied by five.
So whether you liked it or not, to meet the demands of modern hockey and be ready for any challenge, you had to be an innovator, an inventor, an improviser, perhaps even a tyrant in somebody else's eyes. Those who worked from old templates fell behind. Those who searched and took risks had a chance to stay at the front.
Belyakov preferred the front. That was why he could allow himself decisions that looked unexpected to outsiders and sometimes hovered near the edge. Not only during games. During preseason preparation too. During breaks in the championship. When resolving internal conflicts, his decisions sometimes looked strange at first glance. He could work separately with a large group of young players and then bring them into the lineup all at once. He could throw the biggest star off the team with a crash. Before a decisive game, he could negotiate higher bonuses with club management, put a bag of cash in the middle of the locker-room floor, and say:
"That's your bonus for tonight.
"Choose the tactics yourselves. I think it might be better to start aggressively. You can decide who plays with whom and the order in which the units go out. I'm sure you'll sort out the power play and penalty kill too. If you win, there's enough money in that bag for a new car for every one of you. You boys talk it over. I'm going. I'll see you on the bench."
And he would leave. The team would quickly recover from the shock. Things like that did not happen every day in a locker room before a game. Everyone would gather around the captain and the veterans. Without fuss, calmly and seriously, in low voices, they would agree on how to play.
They would draw diagrams on the board for clarity. Then they would step onto the ice and tear the opponent apart. Not for the money. Not for the new car. For the coach. For his genius. For the trust and faith he had placed in his players. Belyakov's father had fought in the war. Ivan Fyodorovich Belyakov went through the entire Great Patriotic War. He was wounded. He served in a penal battalion. He marched across Europe. He saw Warsaw. Vienna. He took Berlin. That was why Petya Belyakov had known the trench truth about war since childhood. He knew wars were won by soldiers, not generals.
And he treated his hockey players the way a good commander treats his men. He rewarded courage, bravery, and heroism. He punished betrayal and cowardice. But he always believed in his men. And they repaid him many times over. There was a reason he had developed an entire system. There was a reason he followed it. There was a reason he selected his players so carefully.
His unconventional moves, subtle decisions, the complicated but effective web of human relationships he wove inside a team, his system of player selection that made sense only to him, and his complex, multilevel work with people all spoke to Belyakov's originality and openness of mind. He never worked on autopilot. The competition was too high. The price of a mistake was too high. Despite having spent many years among Russia's elite coaches, Belyakov did not see himself as a hero or pioneer. He was old school.
Therefore modest. But he approached everything subtly and carefully, sometimes with a little cunning when needed, always understanding exactly what an innovation might bring and how useful it would be for his team. His creative streak helped him everywhere. Belyakov was among the first coaches to take his teams to warm countries during the national-team breaks for Euro Hockey Tour events. And he did not take only the players. He brought their families too. Those trips were always fun. With enthusiasm, jokes, and constant banter, the team would board the club plane with wives and children. Even the young players were allowed to bring their girlfriends.
They flew to Thailand, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, or the United Arab Emirates and stayed right on the seashore in five-star hotels with water parks, swimming pools, numerous restaurants, and first-rate soccer fields. The hockey players trained morning and evening. Their children, wives, and girlfriends spent the day on the beach, sunbathing, swimming, and relaxing. In the evening everyone gathered for dinner, with wine, dancing, contests, and jokes. Day after day, that short week-long camp passed in a lighthearted atmosphere, and then the same club plane carried the large, suntanned, noisy group home, considerably closer to one another than before. The next stage of the season would begin. There were many benefits to those trips. That was why, after Belyakov, a number of coaches from wealthy clubs adopted the idea. But there were drawbacks too. Belyakov noticed them almost immediately, yet he kept taking his teams to the sea, constantly weighing what those trips brought his players: more good or more harm. Eventually he decided the disadvantages outweighed the benefits and became the first coach to stop taking families along.
Other hockey clubs continued flying reflexively to warmer climates for another couple of years, but eventually they followed Belyakov and stopped as well. On the flight home from the last such trip, Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov summarized years of observations about the pros and cons of midseason family camps in the notebook that had grown noticeably thicker:
"In recent years it has become fashionable for teams to travel with their families during breaks in the regular season, when the national team is playing Euro Hockey Tour events. Without question, these team-and-family trips have major advantages. Players get to spend time with their families. The guys get to know one another from a different, non-hockey side. Wives and children meet, and that strengthens the very same correlation, the degree of dependence people have on one another. Families begin becoming friends.
"The wives become more involved in hockey and start living through the team's problems along with their husbands. This immediately brings to mind the wives' councils of the great Tarasov. He used to gather the wives of CSKA players and tell them, 'Girls, there'll be no fur coats, handbags, or sweaters for you this year. Our club isn't going to America or Canada for games. 'Because your husband, ma'am, doesn't battle in front of the net. Yours doesn't help the defensemen. And as for your husband, I don't understand how he plans to keep playing hockey with that attitude. 'So to avoid embarrassing ourselves, CSKA isn't going to America. 'Although, if you can knock some sense into your husbands, we still have time to prepare.'"
After meetings like that, the wives would go home, grab their husbands by the hair, figuratively speaking, and give them such a dressing-down that Tarasov's criticism afterward seemed like child's play. Anatoly Vladimirovich truly had been a great coach. Even family pressure became one of his tools for working with a team. Belyakov continued:
"I'll give an example from our most recent trip. On February fourth we left for a training camp in the United Arab Emirates. The camp lasted one week. By February twelfth we were back at our training base preparing for the next round of the championship.
"According to the players, the camp was hard. We trained on sand and worked in the weight room. The daily schedule was as follows. Morning exercise: a forty-minute aerobic run, some light strength work, then soccer on the sand. At that time of day the tide was out, and the beach became enormously wide. Then breakfast and an hour of rest. The first practice began at eleven in the morning: specialized work on sand plus game-based drills. In the evening, once the heat eased, the second workout began: strength training. The weight room wasn't much, but the coaching staff improvised and came up with exercises, building stations out of whatever we had available. The players treated it all with humor and understanding, so we managed to accomplish what we had planned and work every muscle group we needed. Despite the fact that every day included fairly hard and high-volume training, the team's mood was excellent and smiles never left the players' faces.
"The reason was simple. Their families had come to the UAE with them. During the camp, the players had a chance to spend time with the people closest to them, something they could never do enough during the season. The advantages of such trips are obvious: sunshine, sea, wives, children, a warm atmosphere. Everyone fills up with positive emotion, and that emotional reserve becomes very useful in the playoffs. But there are disadvantages too. First, within one week the players move from winter to summer and back to winter again. That is stress for the body. Most likely, immediately after returning, a coach should be prepared for losses in the next two rounds because a great deal of the body's energy will go toward adaptation and reacclimatization. Second, warm-weather trips during breaks make sense only for teams with low roster turnover, where people have played together for several years. If a team was built from scratch at the beginning of the season, which happens quite often now, it is better to stay home, practice properly, and play several exhibition games.
"That is why trips to warm seas must be handled very carefully. A new emotional background, a new location, a change of surroundings, and the presence of families unquestionably strengthen and improve a team. But the risk is significant. A team can return from such a trip, never fully come together again, and collapse in the playoffs.
"Our league has seen examples of that kind of tailspin. Everybody remembers them."
Several years earlier, Amur Khabarovsk had chosen a different route. The Far Eastern club decided to look abroad for exhibition opponents. Flying to Europe was too far and did not make much sense. Japan, however, was right next door. The Khabarovsk head coach believed that games against Japanese teams would not only help the club sharpen the physical condition of its leading players but also improve morale through victories. On top of that, games in Japan carried international status, and international competition always brought a different emotional atmosphere. And, of course, foreign travel was still foreign travel. Coaches and players saw one another in a different setting. There were victories, which made everything easier. A different country. A different culture. Wives and children nearby. Everything positive. In other words, Amur's trip to Japan killed several birds with one stone: the club played a series of exhibition games, polished its tactics, changed the scenery, and returned to Russia in excellent game shape. There were also cases when Russian teams traveled during breaks from winter into winter, for example to Switzerland.
Instead of the sea, there were the Alps and skiing, along with two practices a day.
A change of geography and emotions could be excellent.
But experience showed that family trips worked best when a coach had a strong, skilled team he had already worked with for several years and had already won something with.
Then there was no need to work extra on conditioning, endurance, or tactics.
You were taking the team away simply to recharge emotionally. And if the club lost two games in a row after returning, it was not a disaster. It was different when you were coaching a team for the first year and still building it. Then it was better to stay home, work seriously, and, if possible, play a couple of exhibition games so the team would not lose its game rhythm. The main disadvantage of those trips was the change in climate. Flying from winter into summer was usually relatively painless. The acclimatization was not felt as strongly.
Returning from summer into winter was much harder. There was a real risk of colds and flu spreading through the team. So when traveling to warm seas in the middle of winter, a coach had to assume that the first two games after returning might be affected by illness and that young players might have to be inserted into the lineup. Which was not necessarily a bad thing either. Belyakov remembered those family trips warmly. It was always wonderful to fly from cold, snow, and slush into blazing summer, swim in a warm, gentle sea, and watch his happy players surrounded by their wives and children.
He particularly loved the evenings when everybody sat down at one table like one enormous family: coaches, players, wives, children talking noisily all around them. People made kind toasts and said good things about one another. It was sincere. And somehow astonishing.
Because in a sport as hard as hockey, that side of people always remained off camera. Back home, on the ice, everything existed beyond the limits of human endurance. It was not simply hard. Sometimes it was brutal. Needlessly brutal. Treacherous. Dramatic. But here everyone was calm and happy, grateful to one another for the extraordinary opportunities life had given them. Belyakov loved those trips.
He loved those dinners outdoors, where the warmth came not only from the southern night but from the people around him. What struck him most, an old and experienced warrior, a seasoned tournament fighter and fair mentor, was the transformation in his hockey players. He knew every one of them as an unbending, indestructible gladiator. Here they became cheerful, tanned young men. Gentle, loving husbands. Attentive fathers. But all good things eventually come to an end. Every time the team returned from the sea, several people came back feeling sick, with colds or other ailments, and dropped out of practice and games for three to five days, sometimes longer. After weighing the advantages and disadvantages once again, Pyotr Ivanovich decided that, despite all the charm and hospitality of warm countries, it was safer to work at home the old-fashioned way. There was no reason to risk the end of the regular season and the first round of the playoffs. Belyakov stopped traveling to warm climates. Soon afterward the league schedule changed as well. There were more games and shorter breaks for Euro Hockey Tour events. Midseason family training camps from winter into summer gradually disappeared from Russian hockey, leaving warm memories for everyone who had experienced them. The first time Belyakov's team learned that club management was not planning a February trip anywhere, the captain came into the coaches' room and asked directly:
"Pyotr Ivanovich, is it true? We're really not having a February camp?" "You probably didn't come in here to ask about the camp," Belyakov smiled. "You came to ask why we're not flying somewhere warm to lie by the sea." "Well, that too," the captain admitted with a grin. "The guys are worried. We went every year before, and things always worked out in the playoffs. Everybody got used to it. It's a good winning tradition." "So you're talking about luck? Worried about the team?" "Of course," the captain smiled. "Go tell the team this: I'm your luck. You can take your wives to the sea when you're on vacation. During the break we're staying home and working. We do have things to work on, don't we?" "Of course." "Good. Now go get ready for practice."
Luck and superstition had always been inseparable from hockey. Belyakov respected his players' superstitions.
"If it helps their peace of mind to put on the left skate first, let them put on the left skate first.
"If they believe stepping onto the ice with the left foot brings luck, let them do it.
"If somebody needs to have a serious conversation with his stick before a game so he can score, for God's sake.
"Anything that helps the cause, anything that gives them confidence, I'm all for it."
Half joking and half seriously, Belyakov devoted only a single page of his notebook to hockey superstitions:
"A coach should not take players' superstitions seriously, but at the same time he should never openly dismiss them.
"Luck and good fortune might take offense and turn away.
"Hockey is filled with traditions, beliefs, and superstitions that developed over years and decades, and if you dig deeply enough, there may even be a certain logic behind some of them.
"Take refusing interviews before a game.
"That is probably less superstition than healthy pragmatism. Nobody knows how the game will unfold for the team or for the individual player. So why tempt fate by making statements or predictions? Every hockey player has his own sequence, rules, and habits during warmup, while dressing, when leaving the locker room, and when stepping onto the ice. No one would sit in another player's seat on the team plane or on the bus to the arena even under threat of death.
"Everybody knows you don't touch somebody else's sticks in the locker room or try on another player's helmet because you might 'disturb the aura.'
"Nobody poses for photographs before going onto the ice, not even before practice. Many coaches happily play these games too. How does the team leave the room before the game? Who closes the locker-room door behind the players?
"Who dumps the pucks onto the ice for warmup? If the team happened to play without its leader and won, then the next game the highest-paid player on the roster might find himself sitting again. You don't change a winning lineup.
"Hockey has countless superstitions and signs. We're all in God's hands, especially in a dangerous and risky business like hockey. That is why, in my opinion, coaches should not focus attention on players' superstitions, analyze them, criticize them, publicize them, or make them the subject of public discussion, even jokingly. If players want to believe in signs, let them. There is no reason to make them nervous. Whatever they do, as long as they play and score.
"Fundamentally, superstition, like religion, answers a deep human need and may be one of the most important supports a person can lean on in his work, hopes, and undertakings. That is why a coach should react calmly even when players become emotional over situations connected to their superstitions."
Several times Belyakov considered crossing that section out and removing it altogether. In the end, he left it. Luck, good fortune, and simple chance should not be underestimated.
After all, superstition grows from uncertainty. And what else is a coach supposed to believe in when he steps onto the ice against a clearly stronger opponent with a depleted roster? With young players. With players sick with the flu. With a team exhausted after the long flight from Moscow to Khabarovsk. With injured leaders playing through painkilling injections. When everyone has already buried you in advance and even the bookmakers refuse to take bets because the outcome supposedly looks obvious. In situations like that, luck and superstition become almost unavoidable. And the coach has to become both a personal and a team psychologist, taking into account even the way a player steps onto the ice and where he sits in the locker room.
The deeper Belyakov went into psychology, the more often he thought it would be useful to have a full-time psychologist on his coaching staff. A trained, experienced professional, not a self-taught amateur or a loud pretender. Belyakov assessed his own abilities in this field realistically. There was positive experience in the NBA and NHL, where one psychologist, sometimes several, had long been part of every club's staff. Wealthy Russian hockey teams had also tried bringing in sports psychologists, but one way or another those experiments usually ended badly. Players treated the club management's innovation as entertainment. They simply did not trust outsiders. Educated men who had never lived inside hockey. Given a choice, hockey players, most of them highly aggressive and self-confident men, preferred to discuss their problems on the ice or in life with the head coach, a man who had long since earned their loyalty, respect, and trust.
Talking about hockey, or admitting uncertainty about some game or life situation, to somebody completely outside the gladiators' world seemed ridiculous to them. Now, if a psychologist appeared who had lived a full hockey life, won championships, played for the national team, spent ten years in the NHL, and experienced everything there from development to triumph, that man they might listen to. They might trust him.
They might share fears or problems. A man like that was one of their own. Equal in spirit. Someone they could open up to and listen to as an older teammate, as a dyadka who had been everywhere and seen everything. Belyakov understood all of that perfectly. Still, being an educated and perceptive man, he believed compromise was possible. The time would come when psychologists would become a natural and necessary part of a team's life. For now, however, the head coach had to carry nearly the entire psychological burden himself. Assistants simply did not possess the same experience and authority inside the team. And people, not only hockey players, were built that way. If there was one man in charge, they wanted to take every important issue directly to him, not to deputies or assistants. Even though Belyakov's coaching staff was filled with highly competent men. Pyotr Ivanovich had worked with all of them before. He had won with them. He had gone through everything with them when they were still players. In Belyakov's system, every one of them had once been either a Star or a Reliable player. With age they had become dyadki.
And when their playing careers ended, Belyakov invited them to join his coaching staff. Belyakov believed there were hockey players, and then there were Players. Men built for big things. Men you could win with. Men capable of turning around a game that was going badly. Men who would not flinch in a difficult moment and would behave like heroes. Belyakov's assistants belonged to that second group. Bely had a goalie coach, a famous goaltender in his playing days. He had a coach responsible for defensemen, defensive play, and the penalty kill. He had a forwards coach responsible for offense and the power play. There was a strength and conditioning coach who also went onto the ice with Belyakov rather than working only off-ice and in the weight room. And there was a tactician. More precisely, an analyst. His job was to break down opponents, study their tactics, prepare video for team meetings and player review sessions, and propose to Belyakov how the team might approach a particular opponent. The final decision, naturally, always belonged to the head coach. Belyakov's coaching staff was an important part of his success. Whenever he changed clubs, Bely took his assistants with him. These men had already accomplished a great deal in hockey as players. Now they had set ambitious goals for themselves as coaches. They were unquestioningly loyal, dependable, rock-solid assistants Belyakov could always rely on. They understood perfectly well that fate had given them a unique chance to work under a great master and learn from him every minute, during games and even during ordinary practices. Like true athletes, all of them dreamed of becoming head coaches someday and leading teams of their own. For now, they absorbed priceless experience and helped build the legend of Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov.
Lucky.
A master of his craft. Belyakov very much wanted a psychologist to become part of that close coaching group someday. He even tried several times. He spoke to players nearing retirement and suggested it might be worth studying, getting an education in psychology. He explained the opportunities the profession could open up, how a former player with that background would be in demand at almost any club and would never lack work. But either Belyakov kept approaching the wrong men, or the players preferred not to think seriously about life after hockey until their careers were actually over. Either way, nobody showed much enthusiasm. So Belyakov remained both the team psychologist and the personal psychologist for each player under his command. Belyakov wrote the following about it in his notebook:
"Being a psychologist is also an important part of a coach's job, and it is hard to say what matters more: teaching a player to get open at the right moment, or teaching him not to flinch at the most difficult and decisive moment of a game.
"Coaches, like true psychologists, prepare players for games and practices so they will give the necessary effort, so everyone understands the importance of a particular process, where we are going, what will get us there, and why we need it. The clearer the picture in a player's head, the clearer the task and the result he is supposed to pursue. A coach's psychological work with a team happens every second, in every element of the game, throughout the training process and in everyday team life. Every second, coaches are working toward the larger objective, programming the team and every individual player for success, for victory, for the belief that with the right approach everything is achievable.
"Coaches motivate, explain, and advise. The subtle intellectual and psychological process of working with a team never stops for a moment.
"A coach's work as a psychologist takes place in practice, on the bench during games, in the locker room, during pregame meetings.
"It may involve the entire team at once, or forwards separately, defensemen separately, individual five-man units, pairs, forward lines, or one player at a time. It is impossible to give every player as much attention as he deserves, but ideally you should. That is why road trips, flights, bus rides, and plane trips are important. Instead of wasting time, a coach should invite players over and talk to them, build relationships, strengthen correlation. A good coach should know how a player lives. What is his wife's name? How many children does he have? What do his parents do? What hobbies does he have? What interests him outside sport? In other words, you need to understand what your hockey players live and breathe. A coach should also reveal certain things about himself, and not only from his sports life. The coach's job is to build strong relationships and connections with every member of the team. Once a coach begins to understand the main motives driving a person, it becomes easier to mobilize him, prepare him, loosen him up, calm him down. In other words, at the necessary moment the coach can make the necessary adjustment to achieve a specific or overall result. Sometimes a coach has to influence one person through another."
Belyakov was good at influencing one person through another, and he used that ability when he needed it. On one of his teams, the first line consisted of three very experienced veteran forwards. Big stars whose careers were beginning to move toward their final stages. All three were highly accomplished players. At different times they had played for the national team and had lived full hockey lives. In the middle of the season, the center on that famous line, Andrei Lapin, suddenly stopped scoring. Completely. The assists were still coming, but the goals disappeared, while his two wingers continued scoring and collecting points game after game. Belyakov had known Lapa for many years.
They had been through a great deal together. He knew the talented center was an introvert with a very difficult personality, always inside himself.
His own opinion was the only one that truly mattered to him. And naturally, he was dissatisfied with himself. At first all of that frustration stayed inside. Then Lapa began making unreasonable complaints about his linemates. They held onto the puck too long. They passed into his skates. They did not play the puck to him around the opponent's net. They did not get back on defense. He had to do everyone's work. Resentment and irritation began building. Belyakov watched all of this for a while, then before one game called in the two wingers from the first line.
"Guys, just let him score."
The two players obeyed without argument. For the entire first period they played for their center. He scored once. Then again. And the dam broke. During the second half of the season, and especially in the playoffs, the goals began pouring in the way they had in the old days. Lapa believed in himself again. His mood changed dramatically. His attitude toward practices changed. His attitude toward games changed. His linemates became the best players in the world again. Everything returned to its proper place.
"Like children," Pyotr Ivanovich Belyakov would grin for the rest of the season as he watched from the bench while his veteran first unit celebrated goals, especially their center, whom they had fortunately managed to get back into the saddle. I supported him at exactly the right moment," Belyakov thought. "Otherwise he might have faded and fallen apart. You can't ride forever on what you did in the past. Sport is cruel. It demands results here and now. Good thing Lapa managed to climb out of it. We've still got some hockey left in us."
Belyakov took real satisfaction in the power his first forward line demonstrated night after night.
Applying pressure through the group and influencing one player through another were excellent management tools. But they could not be used constantly. First, those moves were complicated and involved several stages. A coach had to understand the situation, sort it out, prepare a solution, keep his cards hidden, involve every participant in the "theatrical performance," play it out, and hope everything went smoothly and the goal was achieved. Second, all of that took time. Inside a hockey team, questions and problems arose every minute and had to be solved immediately. So Belyakov saved complicated, multi-step combinations from psychology textbooks for serious and important situations.
Routine problems he preferred to handle the old-fashioned way: quickly and effectively. Belyakov had an excellent system of fines. Any ordinary screwup cost one hundred dollars. Late for practice, warmup, a meeting, or the team bus? One hundred. Late for anything on game day? Five hundred. Late on game day during the playoffs? Fifteen hundred dollars. The same principle applied on the ice. A second unnecessary penalty in a row. Failure to follow the tactical plan. A serious mistake that directly led to a goal against. All of it cost money. Belyakov also had two special fines. Three thousand dollars for showing up to practice or an off-ice warmup without socks, wearing sneakers on bare feet. The same amount for going outside in winter without a hat. Belyakov was merciless about socks. It was not a whim. It was a practical necessity. A hockey player without socks could rub his foot raw, then be unable to put on a skate. Or he might put it on, limp around, and keep tearing the wound open. Of course, hockey players had character and pain tolerance and could push through almost anything.
That happened all the time. But what would a player with a burning wound inside his skate think about for the entire game? His foot. Not hockey. Not the team. And perhaps the power play or some other important element of the game had been built around that player. One man's stupidity and carelessness could put days of hard work by the entire team at risk. The same applied to hats. After every game and practice, hockey players showered. Then they constantly traveled from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the arena, from the arena back to the hotel or straight to the airport. Winter. Cold. Drafts everywhere. They could not afford to catch colds or get sick because every player was too important to the team. That was why Belyakov personally watched hats, socks, and other seemingly small but important details. A player's helmet could not wobble around on his head. The chin strap had to be pulled tight so the helmet would not fly off in a game or practice after contact or a body check. Players had to step onto the ice with at least two sticks. Belyakov watched all of it himself. And without anger, usually with a smile, he fined people. He liked the fact that nobody had to be yelled at or lectured. The system had come to Russian hockey from the NHL and taken root quickly. In clubs large and small, discipline became ironclad. Nobody wanted to give away hard-earned money for nothing, money earned through sweat and blood. After all, everyone played for money. For that reason, Belyakov devoted considerable space in his system to fines, bonuses, and financial incentives:
"Fines, bonuses, individual incentives, and team incentives are extremely powerful tools in a coach's work. No matter what anyone says about patriotism or love of hockey, everybody plays for money. And if that is true, then for most hockey players financial punishment or financial reward is the clearest and most understandable way to point out mistakes or, on the contrary, reward a player for confident actions that help the team and produce results.
"Russian sport has had an established phrase since the days of powerful Soviet sport: 'he settled into his salary.' In other words, once a player signs a contract and starts making the lineup regularly, he decides his minimum objective has been achieved. Goals and assists? We'll see how they come. There was a very effective way to eliminate that indifference: bonuses. Bonuses are an additional incentive, or motive if you prefer, that encourages players to show their best hockey regardless of the opponent's strength or the team's position in the standings.
"Even at less wealthy clubs, a bonus could be five hundred dollars per standings point. That means a regulation win worth three points gives every player dressed for the game fifteen hundred dollars. That is a serious motive. Bonuses exist everywhere and are established by club management. For playoff-type games, qualification games, or particularly important matchups, bonuses can be raised to extraordinary levels, ten thousand dollars or even several tens of thousands. And that has produced results, and continues to produce results. Many Russian clubs now use progressive bonus systems. For example, a regulation win in the first game earns fifteen hundred dollars. A second consecutive win earns three thousand. A third earns forty-five hundred. And so on until the team loses. After a loss, the bonus resets to the minimum rate of fifteen hundred. This means even highly paid players can earn a very noticeable addition to their salaries through bonuses. Young players, or players who have not yet reached major contracts, can earn several times their base salary through bonuses. There is an argument that clubs should move away from enormous salaries, bring them down to more realistic levels, and increase bonuses instead, so players do not simply receive money but earn it. Naturally, the players' union would strongly oppose that, so it is unlikely to happen. But there is a sensible idea there for club management. In any case, bonuses are a powerful tool for increasing player motivation. Individual bonuses are also a strong motive, although not for everyone. In Russia, individual bonuses are still mainly written into the contracts of star players. The idea is simple. Stars do not always feel like playing at full strength and beyond. A star is expected to produce two or three points per game through goals and assists, and that is extremely difficult. So an individual bonus, a financial reward for meeting personal statistical targets agreed upon before the season, can reach very substantial amounts.
"That pushes leaders to play at full strength and even to dress for games while injured and playing on injections. Bonuses and incentives unquestionably discipline players and force them to treat both their work and results professionally. Enormous bonuses are paid during the playoffs. By the time teams reach elimination games where Cups and medals are decided, the clubs are usually wealthy, and even young players are already earning serious money. Money alone is no longer enough to surprise anyone. That is exactly why club management offers bonuses so large that players begin performing beyond their limits. On wealthy teams with a real chance to win the championship, advancing through each of the first three playoff rounds may bring a player three hundred thousand dollars.
"Winning the final may bring another five hundred thousand.
"If a hockey player becomes champion and plays every playoff game, his playoff bonuses alone can total one million four hundred thousand dollars. Add his seasonal salary, regular-season win bonuses, and personal incentives. And now imagine these players, already earning that kind of money, still having to push themselves, practice, break bones, and play every game as if it were the last one in their lives. The coaches have to find a way to keep this money-spoiled group pushing itself again and again so the team does not simply play, but tears itself apart and wins. At that point, it is not enough to invent a system and follow it. Every day you have to come up with something new, twist, maneuver, and be clever. The head coach in any club always occupies an executioner's-chair position. Players want to practice less and earn more. Club owners want to pay everybody less while still having the best hockey players, packed arenas, and championship medals. In that confrontation, the head coach becomes the buffer between the players and the owners. The poor head coach, like a snake on a hot griddle, has to keep twisting and doing everything possible to make one side practice and play at maximum effort, while making the other side keep its promises, pay everything agreed upon, and stay out of team affairs. It is not an enviable role. That is why every successful coach has his own training system, player-selection system, motivation system, trusted assistants, and dependable players with whom he can win and accomplish great things. But even with all of that, a coach still needs knowledge, experience, the ability to develop constantly, and unquestioned authority. Because there are things only the coach sees. Nobody else sees them. And if the head coach says, 'Today we're doing it this way,' everyone must believe him, go out and do it. And when it works, they should be surprised and impressed by the coach's genius. That is the only way authority, loyalty, and faith in the leader you follow are earned." "Very dramatic," Belyakov smiled after rereading his section on bonuses and incentives.
But he decided not to change or cross out anything. He left it as it was. For history. Belyakov was convinced that the era of insane money in professional hockey would eventually pass. Yes, hockey salaries would remain large compared with what ordinary people earned. But the day would come when nobody paid millions simply for playoff games. In the NHL, after all, players were paid for the regular season. They did not receive an extra cent for playoff games.
And yet in North America the playoffs produced the most desperate, vicious, dramatic hockey. People fought until they bled, sparing neither themselves nor their opponents. Because they were playing for a title. For a place in history. Everyone in the NHL had money. The Stanley Cup belonged only to the chosen. Only to great players who had played on great teams. Belyakov was an extremely organized man and always attentive to detail. He demanded the same from his assistants and his players. Professionals had to be professional in everything.
"Everything connected with hockey," he told the team, "requires one hundred percent concentration. During games. In every element of the game. In practice. In every sprint on the ice and every set under the weights. That is the only way to achieve results and win something. In ordinary life you can behave however you like. But even there, I advise you not to lose concentration.
"Think about every step, what you're doing and how you're doing it. Life away from the ice and life on the ice are very closely connected."
Belyakov had several other fines that he might issue or might choose not to.
Those were entirely at his discretion. He could fine a player, or even an entire five-man unit, for losing concentration. For allowing a shorthanded goal while on the power play. For giving up a goal in the opening seconds of a game. For giving up one in the final seconds of a period, when the team had mentally started coasting toward the locker room and surrendered what hockey people call a goal into the locker room. Naturally, every situation was different.
Sometimes a team allowed a goal not because it had made a mistake, but because the opponent had played brilliantly. So Belyakov applied those fines according to the circumstances. He always tried to remain objective and fair, which was why his decisions rarely caused unrest inside the team. To minimize those incidents, Belyakov wrote a short memo for his players. From time to time he returned to it during team meetings and once again went carefully through the points it contained. He had not invented the memo separately. He simply took an entire section from his famous notebook, partially rewrote it, and adapted it for the players. That section was devoted to concentration. In the original notebook, it began this way:
"It is not unusual for a team to allow a shorthanded goal while on the power play. The same can happen in the opening or closing seconds of a period or game at even strength. As a rule, this happens because a team is not fully mentally prepared, or more precisely because it loses concentration. Players on the penalty kill begin from a different psychological position. They are automatically more motivated and concentrated because they have fewer players.
"Playing four against five, and especially three against five, forces them to collect themselves and concentrate at one hundred ten percent. Being down one player reduces their numerical strength by twenty percent. Being down two cuts it almost in half. The penalty kill therefore plays more aggressively, with greater effort, better organization, and maximum concentration because the players are afraid of making a mistake and allowing a goal. On the penalty kill, any mistake can become fatal. Today it is no secret that the outcome of almost any game depends heavily on special teams, on the preparation and talent of the players who go out on the power play and the penalty kill." "Fear of making a mistake is the primary motive for players on the penalty kill, and that fear forces the defending four, or three, to play with maximum discipline, composure, and concentration. Another important motive for the defending players is the desire to prove their superiority: even with one or two fewer players on the ice, we still won't give in.
"Ambition and ego are two of the main pillars on which all sport rests. Sport itself, as I have already written, is a competitive environment. The psychology of the five-man power-play unit is completely different. They have the numerical advantage. That means they have a better chance of a favorable outcome. And that can lead to overconfidence, insufficient mental preparation, and, as a result, a loss of concentration. That is precisely why a fully charged penalty-killing unit can force a turnover and punish the power-play unit with a shorthanded goal. Coaches therefore have to work with the power play not only tactically but psychologically as well, reducing shorthanded goals against to an absolute minimum. Something similar happens during the opening and closing seconds of periods and games. Goals allowed in the opening seconds usually come from taking too long to get going, the same lack of mental readiness. Goals allowed in the final seconds come from the attitude of, 'Let's just finish this off and go rest.'
"Again, a loss of concentration. Coaches should draw special attention to these moments and take preventive measures, through discussions and tactical sessions devoted specifically to these situations. Every top team starts a period hard and finishes it the same way, especially during the final two minutes. That is why, late in a period or late in a game, you so often hear a head coach say: 'All right, boys, focus. Let's finish strong.'" The same principle applies before a team steps onto the ice. Everybody says the same words: 'Come on, boys, no slow start. From the first shift. Right from the beginning.' But most of the time this is more tradition than explanation, because very few people actually tell the players why a team has to start hard and finish hard. The answer lies in human psychology. Most people think the way they do in the old joke: 'We'll take our time and get the whole herd in the end.' Except sometimes a team gives up two goals early and spends the entire game unable to get them back. And once again, the cause is loss of concentration. The inability to protect a lead is connected to the same lack of readiness and loss of concentration.
"There are countless examples of teams going up by two or even three goals and still losing by the end of the game. Psychologically, this is almost identical to what happens on the power play. A multi-goal lead relaxes the players and makes them comfortable. Even the coach's calls to focus and keep playing their game stop getting through. Meanwhile, all the trailing team needs is one goal. That goal gives them hope and the desire to close the gap. If they manage to cut the deficit to one, the psychological advantage shifts almost completely to their side. The team that had been leading can suddenly panic. And that moment can decide the game. So when experienced coaches say hockey has to be played from the first second to the final horn, regardless of what the scoreboard says, what they are really talking about is concentration. Concentration is necessary in every segment and every second of the game, no matter how the game is unfolding."
Belyakov spoke with his players often about the drama of a game, concentration, and special-teams situations.
When everybody understood the process and felt involved in it, the work became easier and more enjoyable. And fines became the exception rather than the rule. Belyakov did not like fining his hockey players. But like a loving father who wanted his mischievous children to achieve something in life, sometimes he had to. As on most teams, the fine money was not spent immediately. The administrator collected it in a large three-liter jar.
At the end of the season, the team cheerfully drank it away together so nobody would feel that someone else had pocketed his money. Belyakov had one iron rule about life: Everything had to be fair. Life was easier that way, whether you were riding high, winning medals and enjoying everyone's favor, or sitting for a second straight year without a team and without a job. That happened in the life of almost every coach. Belyakov was no exception. Far from everything in his career had gone smoothly, especially at the beginning. He had taken his share of hard knocks. That was why, when people attributed all of his success to luck, he never argued. He never tried to persuade them otherwise. He never proved anything or explained himself. Because there was no way to explain how much labor, sweat, blood, sleepless nights, torment, disappointment, and experimentation had gone into every season. How many sacrifices, mistakes, and dramas he had lived through. From the outside, to someone who knew nothing about the game, hockey looked simple.
A bunch of men chased a puck one way, then the other. They changed. The next group jumped over the boards. But in reality, hockey was enormous work. A serious science. An entire world. If it were anything less, this great game would never have had so many devoted followers. And it would never have created and given the world so many heroes. Belyakov had always known that.
He had loved hockey all his life. He had been loyal to it all his life. And he had always carried his share of the load honestly. As for the fact that luck tends to favor the hardworking... Everyone knows that much.
2020
The Theory of the Deke
FINAL
There has always been plenty of debate among hockey people, coaches and players alike, about what matters most in the game: speed or strength, skill or endurance, skating well or shooting hard, seeing the ice or making an accurate pass, reading the play or having a tough, uncompromising competitive edge.
"It all matters," Andrei Stepanovich Somsikov would always say in a conciliatory tone whenever his younger colleagues got carried away and started raising their voices as they argued their points.
Somsikov, a solid defenseman in his playing days, had been known as Som or Somik, depending on the situation. Now he was an excellent youth coach. He was not merely trying to calm the younger coaches down and make peace between them. He genuinely believed what he was saying.
Som had seen plenty in hockey.
As a young player, he had been very good. Fans loved his speed, boldness, feistiness, and reckless willingness to play right on the edge. But as he grew older, wiser, and more mature as a hockey player, Som settled down and became a pragmatic, dependable defenseman.
For a defenseman, that mattered more than abandoning your own zone to join the forwards on the rush and then hoping for the best.
By twenty-five, the offensive defenseman Andrei Somsikov had become a stay-at-home D-man, and that was one of the reasons his career lasted as long as it did. Any coach would choose plain, old-fashioned reliability over questionable offensive flair and risk, even when that risk was justified.
Every coach will tell you he loves offense: fast, sharp, aggressive hockey played at such speed that sparks seem to fly from the players' skates.
But not at the expense of defense.
That was why smart coaches wanted smart, calm, levelheaded defensemen, usually mature, established players. Let the forwards worry about offense: young, predatory, quick, hungry for goals, though preferably smart and levelheaded too.
Hockey, after all, is a thinking game.
Everything happens and changes too quickly on the ice. You need an exceptional hockey mind not merely to react to what is happening, but to anticipate it and think two or three moves ahead.
Otherwise, you simply can't play hockey.
That was what Som did every day, in every practice, every game, and every shift: calculate, analyze, think things through.
That was also why coaching came naturally to him.
Andrei Stepanovich Somsikov could easily have coached junior teams or professionals, but he chose to teach children.
He had enormous experience as a first-rate defenseman, and there was still plenty he could do on the ice himself. Even now, well into his fifties, he could demonstrate many things to the kids personally. Naturally, that earned him their genuine interest, attention, and respect.
His authority was unquestioned.
It was hard not to be impressed by the skill and charisma of a first-rate player, even a former one.
Andrei Stepanovich got along easily with children. He loved watching them grow, seeing awkward young colts turn before his eyes, and with his direct involvement, into thoroughbred racehorses.
Adult hockey had never attracted him as a coach, with its constant stress, the endless chase for standings points at any cost, and the never-ending travel.
He had grown tired of the nomadic life while he was still a player. So when he began coaching children, he was simply happy that every trip to a game meant nothing more than a bus ride through his hometown or the surrounding area.
He loved leaving for the arena every morning and coming home again that same evening.
The only exceptions were summer training camps and the occasional travel tournament, when he had to leave home for a week or two. But even that was useful. Every now and then, it wasn't a bad idea to get away and clear your head.
When former star defenseman Andrei Somsikov took over his first children's team, becoming the young and inexperienced Coach Andrei Stepanovich Somsikov, he was shocked to discover that the seven-year-olds he'd inherited had to be taught everything.
Absolutely everything.
Everything had to start from scratch.
Many of the boys didn't even know how to hold a stick properly. They could barely skate and couldn't make an accurate tape-to-tape pass from six feet away.
At first, Som was overwhelmed. He didn't know where to begin or what to tackle first.
Then he pulled himself together, settled down, and, like a true athlete, accepted the challenge.
He took some things from books. Some he had to remember from his own childhood. Other things came from colleagues, older and more experienced coaches.
And little by little, things began to move.
As he took that first team from little kids all the way into their teenage years, he came to understand that everything really did matter in hockey.
When he'd been growing up himself, it had seemed as though all his skill had simply appeared somehow, almost by itself, as if he'd been born with it.
The reality was very different.
To teach children even the fundamentals of hockey, never mind take them anywhere near mastery, you had to work with them every single day and systematically develop every hockey skill and every quality a player needed.
And you couldn't calmly and methodically develop just one thing at a time. You had to develop everything at once.
That was precisely why hockey practices were so interesting and varied.
You could not become a first-rate hockey player with a major hole in your game.
Only constant, intelligent, varied training could turn an ordinary but talented and hardworking kid into a first-rate player.
Practice, practice, and more practice.
Every muscle group. Every hockey skill.
Speed and quickness. Strength and conditioning. Endurance. Daily, painstaking work on technique.
And much more besides.
Hockey demanded a tremendous range of abilities.
Everything really did matter.
You had to skate fast and skate well. You had to change direction without losing speed and instantly transition from skating forward to skating backward, preferably without losing speed there either, because hockey was a dynamic game and situations changed in a heartbeat.
But skating fast and well wasn't enough.
You had to sense the play, anticipate it, read it. You had to understand how a situation was likely to develop and where you needed to be when it did.
The player who thinks quickly skates less, wastes less energy, and somehow always seems to be in the right place no matter how the play develops.
So skating and intelligent movement on the ice were crucial.
They were the foundation.
Just as important were great hands. You had to be able to beat a defender one-on-one, tie opposing players in knots, and, when you got in alone, fake the goalie right out of his pants.
You had to be able to shoot from different areas of the ice and in different situations: wrist shots, shots in stride, one-timers, shots while your feet were moving. You had to set your feet properly and shoot from a standstill.
You needed a big slap shot from distance, with a full windup, and a short, quick release in tight, when there was no time to load up because two defenders were already closing on you or standing right beside you.
You had to be able to chip the puck under the crossbar or knock it out of midair the way a tennis player takes a ball on the volley.
And on top of all that, you had to know how to shoot without looking.
You could sell a pass by looking straight at a teammate, then fire the puck through the goalie's five-hole, under the blocker, over the glove, or into the open side.
Then the puck would flutter in the net like a bird caught in a snare, and the crowd would leap to its feet.
Knowing how to shoot wasn't enough.
You had to know how to hit the net.
And score.
Scoring goals was a great talent.
But so was drawing several opponents toward you, pulling the goalie's attention with them, and then, instead of shooting, slipping a clever, perfectly weighted pass into the open side for a teammate who could score with his eyes closed.
Sometimes a brilliant pass was much harder to make, more valuable, and more spectacular than the goal itself.
Players who could not only score but create goals had always been prized, especially those who seemed able to think for everyone on the ice and make the kind of pass a teammate could hardly fail to finish.
And then there were those rare hockey minds who could direct the entire game with a single pass.
Out of several possible options, they chose the one that put the opponent in the worst possible position, and suddenly the whole situation on the ice changed.
A moment earlier, everything had been under control.
Then came one sharp, incisive pass, and suddenly there was a fire at the opponent's net.
Everybody had to drop what they were doing and put it out.
Being a playmaker was a skill in its own right.
A great talent.
Some players were magnificent with the puck. They carried it from one end of the rink to the other, beat defenders, tied people in knots, and wound their way through an entire five-man unit.
More power to them.
But sometimes, while one player carried the puck, three teammates around him were doing important work of their own. They showed for passes, moved into lanes, and made it obvious they were ready to receive the puck.
Naturally, defenders picked them up. Opponents moved toward them and began covering them.
Which was exactly what those teammates wanted.
While the defenders were being distracted, the puck carrier reached the net and scored.
On paper, he got the goal.
But he might never have scored it if his teammates hadn't played intelligently without the puck.
So playing without the puck was no less important than playing with it, no less important than having great hands or being a natural goal scorer.
And you needed endurance, enough to play all three periods, and sometimes overtime, at tremendous speed.
You needed strength so you wouldn't lose battles along the boards or in front of the net. You had to win puck battles and absorb hits from players just as strong and mean as you were, players doing everything possible to stop you from making the right play and to make your life as difficult as possible.
That required power and strength.
It helped to be big, close to 220 pounds with a mountain of muscle, and to have a naturally powerful heart capable of pumping blood and oxygen through all of it while handling the inhuman physical demands of games and practices.
Which meant that without exceptional health, the right height and weight, and a powerful build, playing hockey was difficult too.
It was a hard, physical game.
Bones really did crack and break.
There were exceptions, of course. Smaller players could use intelligence and speed to hold their own against enormous giants.
But those were exceptions that proved the rule.
In professional hockey, even the giants thought quickly and made decisions instantly.
The players who lasted in hockey were the ones who thought several moves ahead every second and always had a Plan B, no matter what happened on the ice.
So everything mattered.
Thinking quickly mattered. Reading and understanding the game mattered. Moving properly mattered. Skating fast mattered. So did moving the puck, passing it, and getting open.
Defending properly.
Closing on an opponent properly and taking the puck away.
Winning physical battles and knowing how to initiate them anywhere on the ice.
Starting the attack correctly and knowing when and how to join it without disrupting the play.
And, when the opportunity came, finishing that attack with a goal.
You needed extraordinary health, strength, power, endurance, the right size and weight.
In short, everything mattered in hockey.
There was no single quality you could isolate and say, This matters, and you can play without the rest.
Could you play without speed?
If everybody caught you and closed you down, every attack died as soon as the puck reached you.
Hockey was a sport, and sport meant speed. No matter how skilled or gifted a player might be, without speed he was not much of a player.
Or imagine a player who could do everything but had no endurance.
A game lasted sixty minutes and he had enough gas for twenty.
Who needed a hockey player like that?
Or what about a strong, well-conditioned player who couldn't skate? Couldn't shoot? Couldn't pass?
Worse still, what about a strong, well-conditioned player who possessed all the physical skills but simply didn't understand the game?
Every shift, he was in the wrong place, with the wrong people, doing the wrong thing.
A strong, well-trained, skilled player who could not understand the game was not much use to anyone either.
So a good hockey player was, as mathematicians would put it, a multifactor model.
To play hockey, you had to know how to do everything and possess an entire constellation of athletic and human qualities: intelligence, strength, endurance, skill, character, willpower, work ethic, and much more.
There was a reason people said hockey was the most difficult of all team sports.
Only players without glaring weaknesses could play it at a high level.
And true stars were the ones who possessed every essential hockey quality at an A level or better.
Even then, you might never become great.
There were two more important ingredients in a brilliant career: an instinctive feel for the game and luck.
Neither could be trained.
Neither could be measured with a grade.
You had to be born with them.
That was why Andrei Stepanovich Somsikov, no longer young and therefore considerably wiser, now the head coach of the entire youth hockey school, usually let his younger colleagues have their say. Then, at the end, he would reconcile everyone, calm them down, and sum it all up.
If hockey had one single quality that mattered more than everything else, everyone would simply train that quality and build their game around it.
But despite all the efforts of coaches, parents, and the boys themselves, over ten years at a youth hockey school, an entire age group might produce only one or two players capable of continuing at the junior level.
And sometimes not one of them ever reached the professional game.
Professional hockey demanded too much from a player's skills and health.
"Too much of a multifactor model," gray-haired Som would say with a smile.
He had heard the expression somewhere once and had grown fond of slipping it into conversation every now and then. Among people who understood hockey, people who weren't outsiders to the game, the phrase put everything in its proper place without the need for endless examples and explanations.
Every Monday, all the coaches at the hockey school gathered for a coaches' meeting.
They reviewed the weekend because every age group had played city league games. Then they went onto the ice and played hockey for an hour. As everyone knew, there was no such thing as a former hockey player.
Afterward, pleasantly exhausted and in excellent spirits, they headed for the banya.
That was where the real conversations and arguments usually began.
And they were useful arguments.
They could discuss elements of the game, situations that had come up in Sunday's games, training methods, or simply exchange experience in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere.
The school had plenty of young coaches, but it also had veterans who had already taken two groups of players all the way from little kids to junior hockey, coaches whose former players included professionals and even national-team players.
As head coach of the entire hockey school, Som had personally issued an order: on Mondays, when the teams rested after the weekend round of games, every coach was required to go onto the ice after the coaches' meeting and then spend at least a couple of hours in the banya.
The banya strengthened the staff as a group. It made them friendlier and closer. It gave everyone a chance to relax and recover, and it gave some of the younger coaches an opportunity, in casual conversation, to pick up knowledge or get answers to questions that had been bothering them.
No one could know everything about hockey.
Besides, the game never stood still. It constantly evolved. Rules changed.
It was useful for the younger coaches to talk with the veterans.
Or argue with them.
Truth, as the saying went, was born in argument.
And those games on the ice, when every coach in the school came out to get his lungs working and skate for the sheer pleasure of it before the banya, kept everyone sharp and helped keep their conditioning from slipping away completely.
Most importantly, there was always a chance to flash a little of their old skill and hear the approving jokes of colleagues who knew exactly what they were watching and could appreciate a clever deke, a subtle pass, or an unconventional decision.
There was no breakneck speed in those games.
No heavy contact.
But the skill and hockey intelligence on the ice made them a feast for anyone who truly understood the game.
If only the fans could have seen them.
Som was convinced those Mondays had a tremendously positive effect on the coaching staff and the atmosphere within it. He intended to make the tradition permanent and watched closely to make sure nobody found excuses to skip it.
This time, toward the end of their banya session, an argument broke out over how much credit coaches deserved for the success of the players they had developed.
Some, mostly younger coaches still at the beginning of their careers, believed that coaches, and coaches alone, were responsible for a player's professional and personal development.
It was the coaches, they argued, who cultivated and nurtured everything best in the hockey players who eventually reached the professional level.
The older coaches, those who had worked with children for ten years or more, saw things differently.
A coach's role was unquestionably important, they said.
But so was the role of the parents, who helped a child grow his wings and were with him around the clock, raising him, supporting him, and suffering through every mistake, every failure, every pulled muscle, fracture, bump, and concussion.
The team mattered too. The group a talented boy played in reinforced many skills and qualities in him, not only hockey qualities, but qualities he would carry through the rest of his life.
Regular school mattered as well. It educated him, developed his mind, and shaped his view of the world.
But the person most responsible for a player's success was the player himself.
He was the one who came to the arena every day, listened to his coaches, absorbed what they said, analyzed it, and learned from it.
Most importantly, he worked like a man possessed in games and practices and never spared himself.
Worked, worked, and worked.
He did it as a child. He did it in junior hockey. And even after making a professional senior team, he still had to practice, work, and improve himself every day.
In sports, yesterday's work and past accomplishments did not carry you very far.
A new day meant a new battle.
A new challenge.
Yes, a coach taught you something. Gave advice. Sometimes encouraged you. Sometimes punished you, threw you out of practice, or scratched you from a game.
But those were fragments.
Every day, every practice, the boy who would eventually become a professional or even a star worked.
Every minute he dreamed about becoming the best and pushed himself toward it.
Like a real athlete, he pushed through his own limits, his laziness, and whatever circumstances life put in his way.
"In a word, he wanted it," Andrei Stepanovich Somsikov said, finally joining the discussion when the younger coaches, with their usual impulsiveness and insistence, once again began turning up the temperature. "He wanted to become a player, and he moved toward that goal. The coach, or coaches, are an important part of it. I'm not arguing with that. But they're not the only part, and certainly not the most important.
"I had plenty of coaches myself, both when I was growing up and later, when I was already playing. For some of them, I would've died. Others I couldn't stand, and sometimes I'd even do something just to spite them. Doesn't make me look good, but it's the truth. That's life."
Everyone understood.
Some smiled. Others nodded.
Over the course of long athletic careers, everyone in the banya had accumulated his own stories and his own complicated relationships with coaches.
"A great deal depends on the children themselves," Som continued, speaking with the authority of experience. He had already graduated two groups from the school, and each had produced a junior national-team player, while several others had gone on to play professionally in the country's top league. "It depends on their intelligence and character, assuming God gave them the health and size they need.
"And we're no different from a regular school. Education is a two-way process. It isn't enough to present the material properly. The kid has to be capable of absorbing it.
"There's no point trying to coach a kid who simply can't absorb what you're teaching. You give everything you've got, do everything right, and nothing comes back. It's completely different working with kids who get it. And the highest level is working with the ones who get it fast.
"I'll tell you a story."
Som suddenly became animated and shifted into a more comfortable position.
"This was my first group. My first team. They weren't little anymore, maybe twelve years old. They could already do a few things.
"We were working on a deke. Actually, not even a deke exactly. A one-on-one move. More precisely, a variation on beating a defender one-on-one.
"There aren't that many basic options. You can beat him to the stick side, slip the puck through his feet, catch him moving the wrong way, or use your speed and go around him on the outside. But why am I telling you this? You already know."
Som smiled.
"Back in our day, almost anybody could tie an opposing player in knots and beat him one-on-one. Kids today are different. They don't play outside anymore. They don't spend summer vacations playing soccer and basketball in the street. They don't play hockey in felt boots on outdoor rinks in winter. So where is that skill supposed to come from? How are they supposed to learn to beat somebody one-on-one if they barely know what it looks like?"
Everyone in the banya nodded silently, agreeing with practically every word Som said.
"We couldn't be dragged away from the rink or the street. We'd stay outside until somebody forced us home. Kids today are completely different."
Andrei Stepanovich waved a hand in frustration.
"Now, if a kid can beat somebody one-on-one, suddenly he's a Player. Everybody starts fussing over him and taking care of him so they don't somehow overlook the talent."
The banya came alive in agreement. Someone even laughed at the head coach's sad joke.
Every coach wanted talented kids who could really play, wanted his daily work, experience, and knowledge to sink in rather than disappear into sand.
But where were they supposed to find that many gifted young players, kids who rang like crystal and shone?
So they worked with the children they had.
"Back in my day," Stepanovich continued, "if you couldn't beat a guy one-on-one, you were done with hockey. You went to the equipment manager and turned in your sticks and gear.
"Everybody knew how to beat a man, how to deke. When I was a kid, we called it *vodit'sya*. Now they call it dribbling."
Stepanovich smiled.
"Some were better at it, some worse, but plenty of players could beat an opponent. Lots of kids had interesting, skilled hands. Now, when you get a boy like that, that's it. He's practically a star."
The banya came alive again.
"Ah, never mind."
Som waved his hand once more.
As head coach of the youth hockey school, he knew exactly how many truly capable and talented players there were at every age level, and the number was discouraging.
More than that, many of the children training at the school today would never have been allowed anywhere near serious hockey in Soviet times.
The standards, even for little children and young players, had been extremely demanding.
That, in Som's view, was why the Soviet Union had once crushed everyone in world hockey. Whenever the USSR national team entered a tournament, there had been only one acceptable place for it.
First.
"Anyway," Andrei Stepanovich continued, "by the time my boys were twelve, naturally I'd already taught them all the basic ways to beat a defender. I decided it was time to move on.
"I wanted to show them something subtler. More complicated.
"So I planned the practice properly. Warmed them up. Ran several progression drills leading into the move, then two main drills. I broke the move down into phases, just the way you're supposed to. We practiced each phase separately, then put them together.
"After that, we tried the whole thing with a puck at low speed on clean ice. No resistance. No pressure.
"Then we started doing the move faster, still without resistance.
"Next I had the defensemen turn their sticks around so the forwards had to beat the shafts instead of the blades. That way the puck wouldn't go flying off somewhere when they made the move, and it was a little easier for them.
"Then we did the same thing faster with the sticks still reversed.
"Then the defensemen held their sticks normally.
"Then we sped everything up again.
"And finally I said, all right, full contact now. Game conditions. Full speed, the way it's supposed to be done..."
Stepanovich grabbed his head in both hands.
"And all hell broke loose.
"Pucks rolling off sticks, flying everywhere. Everybody's skating like crazy, but nobody can beat anybody. Half of them couldn't even remember the sequence of the phases in the move.
"It was a disaster.
"Every coaching manual that talks about the theory of the deke says the same thing. In any sport built on speed and power, and hockey is one of them, speed and technique decide everything. When you're beating an opponent, the sequence, rhythm, and timing of the phases are critical."
Stepanovich looked around the banya.
The experienced coaches were smiling.
They knew exactly what he meant.
The younger ones had gone quiet and were listening closely.
Stepanovich smiled and continued.
"For those of you who've lost the thread, I'll give you the simplest possible example.
"Say you want to beat a defender and slip past him with the puck at speed along the boards.
"First, everything about you, your body language and your actions, has to tell him you're planning to go toward the middle, away from the boards.
"And you have to sell it.
"You actually start going inside.
"When the defenseman believes you, commits, and starts moving across to cut you off, you cut back toward the boards at the last possible moment and accelerate past him on the outside.
"To beat him, you have to hide your true intention and give him nothing that gives it away.
"In scientific language, it looks like this."
Som glanced at the younger coaches again to make sure his lecture still had their attention.
It did.
"Phase A1. The puck comes to you. You lift your eyes toward the opponent you intend to beat. You look at him, analyze him, lock his attention onto you, and show him with everything you've got that you have no intention of passing or moving the puck somewhere else. You're carrying it yourself.
"Once you've convinced him, phase one is complete.
"He believes you're going yourself.
"Now he's trying to figure out which way. Along the boards or toward the middle?
"Phase A2. You look past him toward the middle, toward the space where you're supposedly going to accelerate.
"Phase A3. You start toward the middle and begin accelerating.
"The opposing player starts moving too, leaving the boards and coming across to cut you off.
"This is where it's critical not to scare him off by going toward the boards too early.
"If he realizes that your real objective is to go down the wall, he'll slow down, adjust, and start backing in so you can't beat him outside and drive the net.
"So you actually have to make several strides toward the middle.
"Then, when the defender has committed completely, moving away from the boards and expecting the next phase, A4, where he thinks you're going to accelerate hard, use your body to protect the puck, and try to avoid contact with him...
"That's when you go to phase B1.
"It is a move he is not expecting at all.
"You cut sharply back toward the boards and beat him going the opposite way."
The younger coaches listened with real interest now, catching every word.
"The theory of the deke, gentlemen," Stepanovich said with another smile, "is simple. You do A1, A2, A3, A4, and everybody expects A5, A6, A7...
"But instead of A5, you give them B1, B2, B3, and so on.
"Put simply, every team sport, hockey, soccer, handball, whatever it happens to be, is built on the same principle.
"You show them one thing...
"and do something completely different."
Andrei Stepanovich Somsikov looked around the banya again.
Everyone was listening with interest. Some even seemed surprised by the depth and almost academic precision of the head coach's knowledge.
"Why am I going this deep into the theory?
"Because at that practice, I broke that move down for the team from beginning to end. I explained every last thing. Broke it into phases. Put the phases back together. Let them try it.
"I demonstrated it myself several times.
"I stopped practice a couple of times to explain certain details, all the little subtleties and nuances.
"And at the end of practice, only a handful of them could do it properly."
"Well, that's normal," said Viktor Voronov, an experienced youth coach who had already taken one group all the way from little kids into their teenage years.
"Of course it's normal, Vitya. I'm not arguing. Any skill is built through repetition. If you rehearse that move regularly in practice, first two kids will get it. Then another two. Eventually maybe half the team will master it and start using it in games.
"But I started telling you about that practice and the theory of the deke for a different reason.
"I finished that session frustrated.
"Only a few boys had learned the move. As far as the team was concerned, the practice had practically been wasted.
"I told them practice was over and sent everyone to the locker room to get ready for dryland. We'd only just started introducing them to weight training back then.
"The team started heading off the ice.
"Then the goalie skated over to me and said, 'Andrei Stepanovich, how about a shootout with a somersault on the line?'
"I thought, You cocky little bastard. All right. Let's see.
"But out loud I said, 'Sure. Only here's the deal. If I don't score, I'll do a somersault right here on the ice. If I score, you crawl on your stomach from here across the ice, across the rubber in the hallway, and all the way to your stall in the locker room.'
"He thought about it.
"Then thought some more.
"'Deal,' he said, and got into the net.
"I thought, Good kid. Not a coward, even if he is a cheeky little pain in the ass.
"And I smiled to myself.
"Of course I could score on a kid. I figured I'd teach the little wise guy a lesson.
"But then I thought I'd score in a way that would surprise him.
"I had this one little shootout move. I could score on any goalie in the world with it.
"Once.
"After that he'd know it was coming, and it wouldn't work a second time."
Som smiled.
For a moment, the player inside him had awakened again.
"It's hard to pull off in a game because nobody gives you the time. But with clean ice and no pressure, you can do it.
"So I thought, I'll show the kid. Let him know this kind of thing exists in hockey too.
"And while I'm at it, I'll teach him how to behave around his elders.
"I yell, 'Ready?'
"He says, 'Ready.'
"I look around to make sure the whole team has left the ice. Didn't want them learning stupid tricks from me.
"Then I see Karavan, Vovka Karavanov, the last kid leaving the ice. He's stopped and he's watching.
"I yell, 'Karavan, locker room. Dryland starts in fifteen minutes. Move it.'
"He seemed to leave.
"Naturally, I scored on the shootout.
"The goalie started crawling toward the exit. And as we all know, crawling in goalie gear isn't exactly convenient.
"He made it to the door. I let him crawl another fifteen feet or so across the rubber, then said, 'All right, that's enough. Go change.'
"He left unhappy.
"Three days later, we've got a game.
"Karavan breaks in alone on the opposing goalie after getting away from the defensemen.
"And with my move, the exact one I'd used in that shootout, he scores.
"He's happy as hell, skating along the boards, bumping fists with the guys. Everybody's yelling, 'Beauty, Karavan!' 'Attaboy, Karavan!'
"When he gets to the bench, I put an arm around him and say, 'Karavan, you stole that from me, didn't you?'
"'Yeah,' he says.
"And he's sitting there grinning.
"That's it, gentlemen.
"No phases.
"No main drills or progression drills.
"Nobody explained a damn thing to him.
"The kid saw it once, copied it, thought about it, probably tried it quietly a couple of times in practice when nobody was looking, and then went out in the very next game and pulled it off."
"Come on, Stepanovich, that's hardly a fair example," Viktor Voronov said. He remembered Karavan well from childhood and had followed his career with pleasure after the boy grew up and became one of the brightest players in the country's top league. "Karavan's a national-team player. He probably had the best hands in the entire school from the time he was ten, and he's got a great hockey brain. Every coach should be so lucky."
"That's exactly why he's Karavan. That's exactly why the whole country knows him. The kid was touched by God from childhood, and on top of that he wasn't lazy. He trained the way he was supposed to.
"He would've become Karavan with another coach too, because that's the kind of kid he was: smart from childhood and a hard worker.
"For a while I even forbade him from skating with the other age groups. He was growing fast at the time. I told him, 'Vova, your body doesn't have enough resources to keep growing and absorb all this training at the same time. Stop, or this is going to end in injuries.'"
"And did he?" Voronov asked.
"Of course he stopped. I'm a strict coach."
Stepanovich smiled.
"That's why, gentlemen, I always find it funny when coaches talk about some star and say, 'I developed him. I taught him everything.'
"Yes, you were there. You were involved. Absolutely.
"But that kid developed himself.
"You can't go out there and score two goals for him in some important final or career-defining game.
"He does that.
"So you have to keep your players' success in perspective and simply be grateful that fate brought you together and gave you the chance to work with boys that talented.
"Coaches grow too when they work with bright, interesting players. You can give the team more sophisticated tactics. Sometimes you can let them solve a situation with skill instead of relying only on discipline.
"So it works both ways."
"Hard to argue with that," one of the younger coaches said.
The conversation continued for a little while longer.
Then everyone decided they could make another couple of trips into the steam room, finish their beer, and start heading home to their families and whatever else they had to do.
Monday, the coaches' only day off, would pass quickly.
Tomorrow morning would bring new practices, new drills, new moments, and the boys' energy and enthusiasm, which recharged the coaches themselves like a battery.
Tomorrow everything would return to its usual rhythm.
And that was wonderful.
2024
The Hero
FINAL
Sergei Nikolayevich Khomchenko, born in 1955, had seen a great deal over his years in hockey. With his own eyes, he had watched the greats play: Kharlamov, Maltsev, Tretiak, Vasiliev. He had lived through the eras of the legendary coaches Tarasov and Tikhonov. He had watched young Fetisov, Makarov, Krutov, Larionov, and many others announce themselves to the hockey world.
He had rejoiced when Kozlov, Mogilny, Fedorov, and Bure began playing across the ocean, and playing so brilliantly that there seemed to be no one better than those young Russian kids in the North Americans' vaunted professional league.
Sergei Nikolayevich had watched the star of mighty Russian hockey rise, and he had watched it set.
Regretfully, of course.
The nineties turned everything upside down.
Hockey, the great game, was turned upside down too.
Sergei Nikolayevich Khomchenko, or simply Khoma when he was young, was one of those players for whom things never quite worked out.
It simply never worked out.
At first, nobody wanted him. Then he seemed to find his game, but the injuries started. Worse, they came one after another, an endless procession of them: first his knees, then his shoulders, then his back, until two concussions in a row finally brought everything to an end.
Of his seven seasons in senior hockey, Khoma spent more time in the infirmary than in locker rooms or on the ice.
After the second concussion, the chief physician at the regional hospital told him calmly but firmly, without politeness or beating around the bush:
"One more concussion and you could go blind."
Khoma understood.
He hung up his skates.
But he didn't leave sports. He trained as a massage therapist and spent his entire adult life in hockey anyway.
It was a rich and rewarding life. He worked for good, solid clubs, was highly regarded by coaches and management, and was loved and respected by the players. He worked with national teams, and his golden, knowing, powerful hands were greatly valued.
In short, he had nothing to complain about.
Things had worked out pretty well.
More than that, while working with the senior national team back in the Soviet era, Sergei Nikolayevich went to the World Championships several times and saw firsthand how the glory of Russian hockey was forged.
He also traveled a couple of times with the national teams to the World Junior Championship. There he watched in delight and admiration as future stars played, young men who only a few years later would become players of the highest caliber. Without losing the youthful fire and brilliance in their hockey, they moved on to the best teams in the world and played so well that their names became known on every continent, whether winter had ever existed there or anyone had ever seen a hockey game.
For generations, every major hockey nation had brought its most talented young players to the World Juniors, and what those young lions did on the ice impressed even the uninitiated, even people watching hockey for the first time.
But as everyone knows, all good things eventually come to an end.
Unfortunately.
In the nineties, the vast Soviet Union collapsed, and great hockey disappeared with it.
Hockey in the first years of the new democracy barely survived.
There was still some kind of national championship in the early nineties, and even a few strong clubs, but it wasn't the same anymore.
It was only a shadow, a parody of the great hockey of the past, when the best players in the world had all played in the Soviet championship and none of the masters went abroad.
In an ordinary league game, any player from Moscow's CSKA, Spartak, or Dynamo could produce something on the ice that professionals elsewhere could only dream of.
That was exactly why, when the Iron Curtain came down, so many guys carrying Russian passports burst so brilliantly and powerfully into the NHL. They were true masters, top professionals at their craft, despite the fact that hockey back home had officially been amateur.
More than that, Russians played leading roles in the NHL then and still do today, and hardly a year passes in world hockey without another young Russian star appearing.
It was all the Soviet school.
It had produced great players, it still produced them, and it would keep producing them.
And in the days of the Soviet Union, the stands were always packed because everyone wanted to see the miracle with their own eyes.
Sergei Nikolayevich found it painful to watch what happened to hockey in the nineties.
Those who could leave, left.
The ones who remained were those who couldn't truly shine or surprise anyone. Talented young players still appeared, but they too quickly took off across the ocean.
Before, making the junior national team had been the crowning achievement of a young hockey player's career.
Now players went to the junior team only if they needed exposure, a chance to showcase themselves and raise their value.
The truly brilliant and talented young players needed no such showcase. They bypassed the junior national team entirely, signed contracts with professional clubs in North America, and immediately forgot their battered and impoverished homeland like a bad dream.
What Sergei Nikolayevich saw with his own eyes in the junior and youth national-team programs simply shocked him.
In the nineties, everyone seemed to have lost their minds.
All anybody cared about was money.
Traditionally, only the best young players in the country were called up to the national team, players who, despite their age, were already regulars on their senior clubs.
Now the junior team was filled with mayors' sons, governors' grandsons, children of senior officials, and kids from wealthy families.
In short, the national-team training base at Novogorsk filled up with players who, by national-team standards, played hockey at a C or C-minus level, but whose families could pay.
Fifty thousand dollars was the price of admission to the national team.
To be fair, they also took five or six real players, guys they simply couldn't leave out because they were already too skilled and too well known in the press.
Those five or six hockey players carried the entire national team on their backs.
They hauled it like burlaki [1], dragging an impossibly heavy barge loaded with well-connected sons and grandsons.
Before the World Junior Championship, there were always four training camps and four international tournaments.
For those camps and tournaments, they took the barge full of well-connected kids along with the burlaki, the seasoned, high-level players who had to drag it.
Only when it was time for the World Championship itself did they assemble a real team: two strong goaltenders, three five-man units of legitimate national-team players, and seven or eight well-connected kids.
There was no getting around that.
The nineties were disgusting years.
Everyone survived however they could, and many people tried to grab whatever they could for themselves at any cost.
Sports were no exception.
People sold their country and its flag without a second thought. Those who were supposed to defend the country's interests and honor traded them for hard cash.
It was a terrible time.
Sergei Nikolayevich burned with shame, turning red down to his shoulders, when he stood behind the glass beside the junior team's bench during games and watched what was happening.
These players, after all, were wearing Russian national-team jerseys, something that in itself was supposed to be an enormous honor and responsibility, something that should have made even the dead and the one-legged play.
Instead, methodical and well-prepared Finns, smart and disciplined Swedes, and angry, crafty Czechs tore the helpless sons and grandsons apart.
Only when the genuinely talented, hungry young players came out for their shifts did the game begin to resemble hockey instead of the beating of helpless children who were being tossed around and having their faces rubbed into the ice.
The worst came in the United States and Canada.
At European tournaments, even with the well-connected kids and spoiled rich boys in the lineup, they could still somehow play and occasionally even sneak onto the medal podium. And there was always an excuse: the World Championship was still a long way off, the coaches were evaluating everyone, giving every candidate for the junior national team a chance to play and prove himself.
But the pre-New Year's tour of North America and the exhibition games against the American and Canadian national teams on the eve of the World Championship could only be called a disgrace.
In those games, the fired-up, hard-nosed Canadians and Americans left nothing of the "barge."
Even the burlaki couldn't help because the imbalance was simply too great.
Even heroism has its limits.
Five players cannot beat a skilled, well-coached team full of talented leaders and predators.
The Russian junior national team would give up seven, eight, sometimes nine goals, and at best manage one or two in reply.
The scores on those North American tours were downright indecent.
Sergei Nikolayevich didn't like remembering that period or telling stories about the years when he had worked extensively with the junior national team.
Still, making the national team remained prestigious, even that version of it.
Besides, in those days you didn't turn down work.
Any work.
And this was the national team.
So Sergei Nikolayevich fought with himself. During games he burned with shame, then reassured himself that he had a family to feed and children to raise.
There was only one story from those years he remembered with pleasure, and he was always happy to tell it whenever the opportunity arose.
It happened in Canada.
That year, the "national team" was getting blown out everywhere it went.
As usual, they had brought plenty of well-connected kids, but for various reasons the real players hadn't come. Injuries kept some away. Others weren't released by their clubs because, as people said then, the "national team" was extracurricular, while the club was your real job.
Yes, things like that happened in the nineties.
There was only one player who truly belonged on the national-team roster and had every right to wear the jersey of Russia's junior national team.
His name was Filipp Seryogin, nicknamed Seryi, a young and very capable defenseman for Spartak Moscow.
Seryi had already played a full season at the senior level. He was planning to head across the ocean in the spring, he was already expected there, and everything had already been arranged.
The national team offered him no additional opportunities or advantages.
But he'd been invited, so Seryi came.
While they trained at Novogorsk, things still looked more or less like hockey and a proper training camp.
Before flying to North America, they played a couple of exhibition games against Moscow teams. They lost, of course, but they weren't blown out. They competed.
Although, to be fair, the senior players weren't exactly going all-out either.
An exhibition game was an exhibition game.
But when they started playing clubs from Canadian and American junior and college leagues, that was when all hell broke loose.
The Canadians and Americans didn't coast through shifts.
They came flying.
They crashed through everything in their path, finished their checks even after a player had gotten rid of the puck, and shot from everywhere, showering the goaltenders with a hail of shots.
"It's terrifying..." the exhausted goalies would say in the locker room between periods.
After hammering shots at the net, the North Americans dug and clawed for pucks around the crease, and the attack started all over again.
Getting the puck out of the defensive zone, or even simply icing it, felt like a blessing because the opposition wouldn't even let them lift their heads, much less settle the puck down, start an attack, and reach the Canadian net.
There was undisguised panic in everyone's eyes and in everything they did.
Nobody was prepared for hockey this intense and aggressive.
Only Seryi remained calm.
He was like a fish in water, completely in his element.
He had seen worse playing senior hockey.
He defended his net calmly, went fearlessly into every collision, happily drove opponents into the boards, knocked them down and sent them sprawling, and confidently started attacks of his own.
It was a shame nobody could support him.
When Seryi realized that after his passes the soft forwards immediately lost the puck, tucking their tails between their legs, and nothing ever developed, he began carrying the puck out of his own zone himself.
Whenever anyone tried to support him, the hard-hitting Canadians hit them so hard that the attack died immediately, and the forwards lost all desire to attack or drive the opponent's net.
Over the entire game, Seryi crossed the offensive blue line only about five times and managed just two shots on goal.
And wouldn't you know it, one of those pucks, after a slap shot and a fortunate deflection for Seryi, found its way into the Canadian net.
Russia lost that game 7-1.
But Seryi was satisfied with the way he'd played.
He hadn't folded, and he hadn't disappeared in the game.
He had played the way a national-team player was supposed to play.
If the team had had twenty more players like him, the Canadians would have had their hands full.
But there was only one Seryi, and the result reflected it.
When the game ended, awards were presented to the best players.
The teams stood on opposite blue lines facing each other while the announcer called the Canadian players' names across the arena and the ten-thousand-seat building roared with delight.
For Russia, the player-of-the-game award went to Seryi.
When the announcer's voice boomed under the roof of the arena:
"Fiii-liiipp Seryoooo-giiin!"
the building fell silent.
Seryi took off his helmet, set his gloves and stick on the ice, and skated over to receive his trophy.
They handed him a small cup.
He accepted it without a word, thanked them, shook hands with everyone involved in the ceremony, and then, instead of quietly skating back to his place, he raised the cup over his head and began skating a lap to show his hard-earned trophy to all ten thousand people in the building.
He held the prize in one hand and acknowledged the fans in the stands with the other.
He had played for them.
He had played honestly, and he wasn't ashamed of his game or of his award.
He had earned it.
Seeing a Russian behave that way after a 7-1 blowout shocked the Canadians.
How could anyone be proud of anything after a result like that?
At first, a heavy, bewildered silence hung over the arena.
Then the booing began.
Then came scattered applause.
Then the applause grew.
It became an ovation.
Then a storm of clapping and a roar from the stands.
And the entire ten-thousand-seat arena rose to its feet.
Ten thousand Canadians, in the birthplace of hockey, stood and applauded a talented young Russian kid who had proven through his play, through every action on the ice, that he was a Player, a true master, devoted to the game, to hockey, to his country, and to the national team.
And he was Russian, with that stubborn, unyielding Russian sporting character.
The next day, every Canadian sports newspaper wrote about the bold act of young Russian defenseman Filipp Seryogin, an act that had nevertheless earned respect in hockey circles.
Sergei Nikolayevich saw with his own eyes how, in one thick, full-color newspaper, a Canadian journalist lamented:
How are we supposed to beat these Russians? What else are we supposed to do if, even after being completely destroyed in a game, a Russian can still use sheer strength of spirit, all by himself, to bring an entire arena to its feet?
Of course, the Russians brought an experimental team. Of course, they weren't focused on the result or trying to win at any cost.
But imagine what happens if Russia brings an entire team of Seryogins to the World Junior Championship. A whole national team of spirited, highly skilled young men with that unbreakable Russian character.
That would be a great team.
We would be in for tremendous hockey, and perhaps a Russia-Canada final.
If that happens, such a final would be a fitting conclusion and a true showcase for the world junior hockey tournament, which brings together the best young hockey players on the planet.
It would be the traditional, epic confrontation between two hockey schools, Russian and Canadian, just as it has been so many times before and has continued for decades.
We still have time to prepare ourselves to win that possible final, and the World Junior Championship as a whole.
It won't be a walk in the park.
Mr. Seryogin showed us that clearly yesterday.
So thank you, Mr. Seryogin.
And go Canada!
Sergei Nikolayevich gave Seryi the newspaper.
On the flight home, they sat next to each other, and Seryi carefully read the article. There were some English words he didn't know, but overall he understood the Canadian journalist's meaning and tone.
He studied the half-page photograph of himself with interest, his arm raised and the cup in his hand.
Then he set the newspaper aside, caught the eye of Sergei Nikolayevich Khomchenko, the national team's massage therapist, winked at him, and said:
"Go Canada, huh? Yeah, we'll see about that."
2024